Today I am grateful for rain. Yesterday was cloudy and gloomy, but we got rain. We have been in drought conditions in our area for several years now. Rain is important. I hope we get more, lots more. Maybe our lawn will come back. Maybe the garden will grow. Maybe the lake will refill. Lots of good things come with rain.
Continuing with the story of the 30 year old wool: Once the wool was certified as moth-free, I tried to think what I should do with it. I had recently bought a DVD by Deb Menz about carding different colors. I had a drum carder; I had dyes; I wanted to play with color; and I had wool that could be used for experimentation. So I decided a color project was in order. I also had recently heard about dyeing with a crock-pot. I enlisted my old crock-pot for the adventure. (It forced me buy a new crock-pot, but some sacrifices have to be made.)
First I mixed up a jar of dye from every color that I had - 9 in all. (They are Lanaset dyes.) Then I tried one batch in the crock-pot, just to make sure that it would work. And to figure out how much wool could be dyed at a time. It turned out that 2 ounces was a good amount. So I weighed out the wool in 2 ounce piles and put each in a white kitchen garbage bag. There were 12 bags.
Each day for the next 2 or 3 weeks I would wash a bag of wool, rinse it, mix up a color of dye, put everything together in the crock-pot and set it out on the porch to cook. By the middle of the afternoon the dye would be exhausted, so I would turn the crock-pot off. I let it cool down overnight. Then in the morning I would rinse the wool, spin it dry in my washing machine, and put it to dry on my drying rack. And start another color. I loved seeing all the colors. Of course, with 9 colors of dye and 12 bags of wool, in the end some mixtures had to be made. But I ended up with 12 different colors of wool. Wonderful.
Continuing with the story of the 30 year old wool: Once the wool was certified as moth-free, I tried to think what I should do with it. I had recently bought a DVD by Deb Menz about carding different colors. I had a drum carder; I had dyes; I wanted to play with color; and I had wool that could be used for experimentation. So I decided a color project was in order. I also had recently heard about dyeing with a crock-pot. I enlisted my old crock-pot for the adventure. (It forced me buy a new crock-pot, but some sacrifices have to be made.)
First I mixed up a jar of dye from every color that I had - 9 in all. (They are Lanaset dyes.) Then I tried one batch in the crock-pot, just to make sure that it would work. And to figure out how much wool could be dyed at a time. It turned out that 2 ounces was a good amount. So I weighed out the wool in 2 ounce piles and put each in a white kitchen garbage bag. There were 12 bags.
Each day for the next 2 or 3 weeks I would wash a bag of wool, rinse it, mix up a color of dye, put everything together in the crock-pot and set it out on the porch to cook. By the middle of the afternoon the dye would be exhausted, so I would turn the crock-pot off. I let it cool down overnight. Then in the morning I would rinse the wool, spin it dry in my washing machine, and put it to dry on my drying rack. And start another color. I loved seeing all the colors. Of course, with 9 colors of dye and 12 bags of wool, in the end some mixtures had to be made. But I ended up with 12 different colors of wool. Wonderful.
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