Oklahoma is to Dye For

A couple of weeks ago, there was a master spinners course being taught in Sulphur, Oklahoma by instructors from Oldes College in Alberta, Canada. They added on a 100 Colors Dye Workshop which our favorite spinner Judi mentioned and Susan, Doreen and I jumped on it like pigs into mud.

Susan slept over while we waited for Doreen to finish her night shift at the hospital, then took off in the dark of night so to arrive in Sulphur for the beginning of class, a bit the worse for wear, albeit with a yummy healthy breakfast at a McDonalds somewhere near the Texas/Oklahoma border. And the class was not playing around at all. We dove into some serious work, masked and gloved, mixing colors, toting canning pots full of jelly jars around to available burners, boiling, draining, spinning dry, etc. etc.

The principal of the course was that we took three primary colors, then mixed 100 colors from them, as you can see above.
Ellen Munro was our taskmaster/teacher. She was reeling off information at lightning speed. Being rather quiet, we had to follow her with ears cocked and notebooks in hand to catch every pearl of wisdom she offered.
Here's Doreen slaving over a hot stove. She was quite the ace at this since we did our measuring with medical syringes. She has obviously had a lot of practice.
We paired off to do our work. Each pair was responsible for 14 colors. I got the lovely Rina as my partner and enjoyed every minute of working with her. In fact, a nicer group of women you couldn't have found anywhere. They came from all over the country.

After mixing all the colors and dyeing our sample skeins, we were allowed to exhaust the remaining dyes on our own fibers. Here were some interesting rovings and skeins dyed with various techniques.

Here is the skein I painted. I'm quite happy with the colors and learned about a product which really helps keep the color in place. It's so funny, when I buy clothes, I always choose subtle colors. But when I buy or dye yarn, it is usually outrageously colorful.

Our thoroughly exhausted threesome limped out at the end of the day to our shared room at the nearby Indian owned motel, where we immediately crashed and burned. Waking an hour or so later to the smells of curry wafting through the halls (an odd smell for Sulphur, Oklahoma) we left to have dinner way out in the boonies with friends. Following them through beautiful landscapes on narrow wildly winding roads, we eventually tumbled onto this treasure.....Steve's Steak Barn.
Here are Carol, Roiana, Susan and Doreen standing in front of the above mentioned establishment in the middle of bloody nowhere. Starving one and all!

We had elaborate decor.
Exotic water features (note the hound puppy drinking from the outdoor shower/bathtub).

Even more exotic locals arrived on strange machines.

Susan seriously risked taking home an adorable kitty with extremely sharp needle like claws.

Gotta tell you, though we swatted lots of flies off our corn on the cob, Steve's steaks were pretty fabulous, as was Steve. Evidently, he had a huge crowd that night, a couple of staff didn't make it, and Steve solved the problem by inviting his biking buddies for kitchen duty in exchange for beer. Not sure how clever that was, but it was rather hilarious. We found our way back home with a different scenic route, not quite so curvy, and by 9PM, we were all snoring.

The next day's class consisted of cutting all of those color samples into tidy little strips, tying them neatly onto pages, then using everyone's work, assembling books of samples with the formulae that we could refer to in the future.

Wouldn't have missed this for the world.

Dyeing is Addictive

Another beautiful Saturday, not too hot, amazing for Texas in August. And I was tempted back to Heritage Arts at the Beaumont Ranch to test dye some Kraemer Sterling before proposing it to the group for our dyeing week-end next month. OK, any excuse will do. Micki and Susan decided to come along, and off we went to the ranch.

Where Lorelei and Sue had already set out the dyes and our worktables on the wooden porches of our little western town.
The process involves a bit of mental planning, then some measuring and stirring.
Then it's off to apply the results of our concoctions. Note Lorelei's blue/green hands here. She hates gloves almost as much as she hates shoes! Susan is hard at work creating "Noriko", a colorway to honor her beloved kitty of the same name. Thanks to Susan for all but two of the photos today. Ms. Angeluna forgot her camera!
Notice how "chic" we all are in our aprons provided thoughtfully by Micki. One of the neighboring shop owners wanted to buy them off our backs if we would stain them with "blood" so they could use them in the upcoming Civil War Reenactment. Impossible. Hard as we tried, our dyes wouldn't work on the non-protein fibers of the aprons. And here is Ms. Angeluna working hard to get the colorway she has so clearly in her mind.
Dyeing done and ready to cook heat set.

Straight out of the oven and too hot to handle. The Kraemer Sterling needed to be rinsed ASAP before the vinegar tarnished the silver.

Voilà, the products of our labors...the two ends are both skeins of Sterling.

And here we have the Sterling samples, which dyed up beautifully. Think these two skeins of Gitane may want to be a shawl.

Just nearby, these beautiful water lilies were languishing in the lake. Eye candy for the overheated dyers.

Can't wait to return. Have lots of new colorways floating in my head like sugarplums. We missed you Celtic Memory.

How exciting is this?

We all love getting surprise packages in the mail. Can you imagine my delight in opening these two.
These beautiful fat balls of silk/cashmere and merino/alpaca came all the way from the Emerald Isle and our friend Jo. They are to be dyed (by the person who has never dyed anything, at least since the tie dye experiments of my childhood). They had some lovely little carved wooden symbol thingies wound in, which I forgot to photograph. One is a tiny serpent to represent the House of Slitherin (which Jo and I feel has been overly maligned, there must be some brilliant and not too evil wizards there), another is a Celtic spiral to represent infinity.
And then there was a box of squishy, glowing goodness from Vermont from K and W. This is from Coppermoose and the Cinnamon one is Silk Tussah while the silver is Alpaca. Coppermoose has some lovely multi-color spindles that look tempting.

What these say is that my friends have much faith in my untested abilities to spin and dye. I shall be working on that spindle this week, having found a lovely little book by Priscilla Gibson Roberts called Spinning in the Old Way, a rave on the virtues of top whorl spindling, which she claims is as fast and more controllable than a wheel, and much more portable.
Since my knitting lately is just more of the same (sock one in Sock Hop is at the toe, sock two started, STR Solstice Slip is getting a heel on sock one) I shall fill in with some photos of one of my assistants, in knitting as well as the office. Here is Paprikas, AKA Poppy, as a most adorable kitten. This photo is "Where is Waldo Poppy? She seems to think she would pass for a routing book. She was there for hours before I saw her. And this is quite a high shelf, which you can't tell from the photo.
And here is Poppy warming the files, a very important job.
And here she has managed to file herself. Barely saw her this time before closing her up in the file drawer for the week-end. Since Persians don't make noises, I suppose I would not have found her until the next time I opened the file drawer. These are not unusual places to find this young lady, she wants so badly to be in the fat middle of everything. Her new trick is draping herself in front of the monitor with her fat paws laid over the keyboard, so that every time I try to see the screen, I see her tail instead.

Who is going to the midnight showing of the new Harry Potter film? ME!!! I tried to tempt some of my Sisters of the Wool, since opening night is knitting night, but I don't think anyone bit. My oldest son and I did it last time and had a blast, there is just something so delicious about catching a midnight premiere. Though we barely got in and they were showing it in every theater in the cineplex, like on ten screens. It was that full! Evidently they are showing it at the Omni theater, on that huge surround screen. That would make for some wild visuals. Might try that. As one of the Sisters said, can you imagine Quidditch in the round? Better catch an extra hour of sleep the night before.