oops

Okay, I totally fell off the wagon of my bloggy March goal, but things in the Hobbledehousehold have been hairy. How's that for a lame + broad excuse? For starters, I dyed up 40 lengths of hand-dyed merino roving, I've created new yarn, batt, and roving labels, and I've been occupied with a cold that's kept me pretty unenthused about wool. I've also caught the podcast bug- after months and months of resistance. I'm working through Lime and Violet, This American Life, Studio 360, and Grammar Girl- please suggest more!

So here's the roving:

My studio is strung with ropes of plain solid and semi-solid lengths of merino for carding batts this weekend, and I'm experimenting and weighing out colorways for a carding session this morning.

Even though T has been helping me out with Hobbledehoy (mostly with Jawbreaker batts and dye marathons), he's starting to feel more and more bummed about the lack of jobs in this area. With three degrees and a killer resume, he's finding himself overqualified for just about everything. A thick cloud of unemployment blues has been really dampening our otherwise jolly home, so we're constantly debating ways to either expand Hobbledehoy to accomodate two, or how we can build T's career from scratch through self-employment. I have this crazy idea- that he can do what I did (accidently): create a fulfilling job out of a hobby. Fingers crossed, of course.

how to kettle-dye fiber

I was preparing the following tutorial to share with someone on Etsy, but decided to share this on my blog for all of my fiber buddies. If you have something to share or correct, please let me know! (for example, I often skip the first rinse and just rinse/wash extra-carefully after dyeing) Enjoy!

Hand dying your own wool may sound frightening and messy. Well, it might be a little messy, but it's not scary at all. Once you get the hang of dying, it's simple to experiment by creating your own unique colors and colorways. You'll be able to control the hue and saturation in order to prepare spinning fiber that will suit any spinning or felting whim.

Here's what you need to get started:

Jacquard Acid Dyes
Vinegar OR Lemon juice (generic is fine)
Big pots*
Face mask
Colander*
Large bowl*
Washer or spin-dryer (optional)
Measuring spoons*
Sink for rinsing
Flexible turner or spoon*
Clothesline or drying rack

aaand FIBER! For this dyeing tutorial, you could use silk, nylon (including icicle and faux cashmere), mohair, angora, alpaca, any type of wool, and any other animal fiber.

*You'll want to make sure that the dishes and utensils you use for dyeing are never again used for food preparation. I found most of my dyeing equipment at yard sales and auctions. You could also check with your local Freecycle.org group or Craigslist.

Dyeing prep:..

Put on your face mask.

I wrote the tutorial with vinegar in mind as my acid-of-choice. Vinegar is cheaper than lemon juice and it doesn't go rancid if not rinsed perfectly. You may also use citric acid, though I don't know how much you'd need to use.

I strongly recommend weighing and dividing your fiber into 4-6 oz. lots before beginning. Stay consistent with measurements of fiber and dye, and colors will be easier to repeat

Before you begin dyeing, you'll want to rinse the fiber you're preparing to dye. Often, there's dust in the roving, and that will come out easily. Fill a large pot with warm water and submerge the fiber that you intend to dye. Allow it to sit for approximately 20 minutes, and then rinse the fiber very gently in your colander in the sink, using the same temperature (approximately) water. Spin the water out of your fiber using the spin cycle of your top loading washing machine or spin dryer.

Fill your pot 2/3 full of water. Add approximately 1/3 cup vinegar. Heat your pot of water on medium heat. You don't want the pot to boil- but a very light simmer is fine. Preferably, the pot should never get hot enough to bubble. Using a half-teaspoon, scoop the color of dye you wish to use and place the dye powder in the pot. Using your large turner or spoon, stir the water until the dye is dissolved. This might take a minute or two, especially for some colors.

Place one 4-6 oz. chunk of wool into the dye pot. Poke the wool down using your spoon so that parts of your roving don't absorb dye faster than other parts. If the water is already heated and steaming, the wool should soak up the dye within 15 minutes, approximately. You'll know that has happened when you lift a spoonful of water out of your dye pot and can see that the water is colorless. Sometimes, a wee trace of color will remain in the water, so don't worry if your water isn't perfectly clear. Use a flexible but sturdy turner OR a spoon to scoop under the roving and lift it out of the dye pot into a medium/large bowl. Then, plop the wet fiber into the colander, and rinse well. After rinsing, you can wash your fiber further by submerging it in slightly soapy water (use a gentle moisturizing soap or a wool wash)- and then rinse again. Once more, use your spin-dryer or washing machine's spin-cycle to get out excess water before hanging it up to dry. This is optional, because you could simply hang the dripping fiber as is.

Throughout the entire process, handle your fiber as little as possible. Don't stir the fiber while its in the pot, don't squeeze or ring the fiber with your hands when rinsing. Use gentle presses and no rubbing. If you wrestle with your fiber too much, you'll end up with a rope of felt. Rapidly boiling water will also felt your fiber.

TIPS:

-After your first few dye attempts, you should be able to notice whether more dye is needed. If the color is lighter than you wanted, add more dye. If you're trying for a pastel, use less. If you want to warm a color up, add yellow or a pinch of red. To cool something down, use blue.

-Black is a very tricky color to dye- it often turns out a muddy dark gray. To counter that, add blue or navy to your dye pot. That will help your black turn out extra dark and solid.

-For fluff, snap your spun-dried wool or roving between two hands without pulling too hard and breaking the length. I start at one end of the roving and give little snaps to the roving, half a foot at a time. This helps to the roving dye faster and fluffier.

-Some colors separate into multiple colors in the dye pot. If that annoys you, make sure you give the dye plenty of time to dissolve in the water and vinegar before adding fiber. Separating colors include (but are not limited to): olive green, brown, purple, emerald green...

-If you've waited and waited and waited and your roving is quite dark but the water is still saturated with color, add more fiber to the pot to soak up the excess dye.

shop update

Whew! The past few days were a little scrambled together, but I finally found a moment to update my shop (and blog- oops!). Trevor and I have started up a new product line- Jawbreaker batts! These are taking over my old Asteroid and LOL batts. Basically, Jawbreaker batts are created from random groupings of color: merino wool + sparkle, carded only once. Some are vivid, some are mild, but all will spin (or felt) beautifully. Here's a few of the sets so far:
I really love how the colors POP when the wool is fed through the carder once. These would be really cool nuno-felted or spun into bulky single plies.

After the past few days minus a personal computer, I got a wee bit behind with communications, but my laptop arrives on Monday and all should fit perfectly in place. right?

I'm still having problems ordering my new laptop, so my internet time has been severely cut by access to a good computer. I spent all day working on new yarns for this weekend's update, and I can't wait to share 'em!

reboot

Today has started off all wrong. Last night, strange sounds in the barn kept us awake (an owl? a raccoon?), and this morning- a pregnant stray cat showed up on our porch for a belly rub. Poor thing, I bet she's due in a week, which means one vet appointment to check on the kittens and another for a post-birth spaying appointment. Also, the nice Toshiba laptop I ordered was out of stock, so I had to scour the internet for an equally awesome deal while trying to figure out the differences between processors and Windows Vista operating systems. gah! It's no wonder I woke up and named a yarn "Short Fuse."

I did finally settle on a laptop which was souped up beyond my needs but still within budget (a toshiba satellite with 4gig ddr and a 320 gig hard drive for a little over $600). And the cat appears healthy AND friendly... so I suppose there's a sunny side to my dilemmas that I should be grateful for.

Oh, and last night, a package arrived- these gorgeous rainbow locks by Wild Hare on Etsy.The locks are so beautiful! They're perfectly clean and very very fine and soft. And the colors are extra-delicious.

I'm planning on brewing a cup of wild blueberry tea and settling down with my drum carder and my favorite colors for a small batt session to chase away a hectic morning.

waynesboro

We lived in Waynesboro, above a family owned shoestore during the first year of our marraige, so today's visit was a fun romp in the not-so-far past.We spent most of the day there- visiting our accountant, window shopping (actually, there wasn't much to see), and browsing the local used bookstore. Here's my "poor me, I had to deal with numbers" splurge:From top to bottom: baklava truffles from Zoe's Chocolate Shop, Star Wreck V: The Undiscovered Nursing Home, Eric Idle (yep, the Monty Python Eric Idle!) The Road to Mars, and a 1st edition collection of 33 short sci-fi stories edited by Harlan Ellison. I just can't get enough pulp sci-fi.

I'm happy to have the whole tax debacle over with. It wasn't nearly as painful as I thought, even though I came with 10 pages of itemized expenses to work through and organize. Next year will be much easier, and heck- I think I might try doing my own taxes.

This week, my production will be a bit off kilter since I'm bringing Trevor in on the business more officially. He's got a huge bag of rainbow wool and sparkle, so I think I'll help him whip up crazy random Asteroid batts.

updates

I just listed a few new batts and handspun in my shop:
And now I'm exhausted! I have a few more yarns to go, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow to list them with the batts I'm currently working on. That is, if I get out of my tax/accounting appointment quickly.

felt

The weather is so warm and perfect today- I decided to perch on my deck and use my clothes lines for drying yarn. While I was outside, I decided to try an experiment- felting a batt into a sheet of wool. I whipped up a thin once-carded batt, pulled out a bamboo place mat, and grabbed a jar of hot soapy water. I placed the batt on the mat, poured water on top, and rolled the batt up in the placemat. After rolling back and forth several dozen times, I re-arranged the batt and started rolling again. Finally, I took the peice of felt inside and rinsed it by squooshing it back and forth under hot hot tap water.
This is the end result!

I'm not sure if I did it right- I was just trying to whip up a quick fun project that was messy enough for the balcony. Next time, I'll use a thicker batt, light shines through thin spots on this peice of felt. Also, the felt has a tiny tiny bit of stretch, which makes me assume that it isn't fully felted. Maybe I'll rinse/scrunch for another five minutes.

Earlier today, I picked up my sewing machine which was badly in need of a tune-up. I also found out I was using the wrong thread (d'oh!) and that my rotten polyester choice was causing extra tension. Maybe I'll hand-felt and sew myself a lined tote bag. Oh projects, why do you eat up my work schedule? I really need to update my shop tomorrow- a row of beautiful Springy yarns are waving on my clothesline, and I've got a dozen batts in three colorways that are waiting to be listed.

Tomorrow!

dye blur

This morning is a blur of dyes! I have purple and orange merino on the stove top now- and blue and raspberry bamboo dyeing in containers on the counter. Here's the teal I just pulled out of a dyepot- all blurry with steam and a long moving exposure.
I couldn't hide last night's bobbins any longer, they're just too pretty! I meant to ply them together, but I got sucked into a little CSI with T. I guess they'll have to wait until Sunday now, since I'm hoping to work on batts all day Saturday.
This afternoon, I'm working on a little campy fiction sci-fi zine with my friend Barbara (her etsy shop, StLucyBelle is here) We've been working on a pre-apocalyptic theme, and so far it's going okay. I'm not a natural writer, so the idea of putting my fiction out into the big wide Etsy world is really frightening. I should be writing a few silly haikus for the zine right now, but I'm procrastinating by mixing up more dyes.

slowspun

I spent a lazy slow day filling up bobbins for two 2ply yarns. I'd show bobbin-shots, but I think I'll unveil those on Saturday when I can finally show off the finished product. Why oh why do two-plies take so long to whip up? They're the priciest yarns I list in my shop, but they're worth more than I've ever had the guts to list them for.

Oh, I've got a few more batt club spaces available this month. I'm also going to be unleashing a self-striping yarn club and a new handspun club, just as soon as I get a hankering for photoshop again.Aaand for really ultra-exciting news- I just got a GORGEOUS sett of Jazzturtle batts in the mail today! I've been trading with Esther monthly for the past few months, and this month's selection knocked the wind out of me- they're super-luxurious! If you haven't tried Jazzturtle batts yet, you're missing out.

intergalactic colorways

I'm guessing most of the people who stumble onto this blog already know how much of a sci-fi addict I am. I've been working through Deep Space Nine- somewhat reluctantly (I'm a trekkie- but I prefer TOS and TNG to the newer Voyager and Enterprise). Now that the end of the series is only a day or two of spinning away, I'm sadly realizing that this means I'll have seen ever Star Trek episode that has ever aired, thanks to Netflix.
There's nothing left, except to wait for the J.J. Abrams film and dig through another tv show altogether. So, is Babylon 5 any good? Has anyone worked through all of the old Battlestar Galactica? I remember when I started spinning, I was working through the original Star Trek series, finding yarn colorway inspirations in the cheesy neon styrophoam settings.

Until I find something new, I'm starting the Mad Men series- but it's definitely too distracting to work on wool while watching. The directing is too good. So please, give a spinner a good tv show shout-out. Something with dialogue and vivid visuals- but not too visually driven.

taxes

Today, I finished organizing my '08 taxes. The five hours I spent peeling through layers of Paypal was as dry as.. as dead grass.
I have discovered a few interesting things about my spending habits though- my favorite splurges are on other people's hand-prepared spinning fibers or on farm-fresh alpaca. I'm taking the rest of the evening to mull over the results and re-calculate both expenditures and profit.

vivid bamboo

Okay- bamboo is notoriously tricky to dye into saturated colors, but this is as good as it gets (for me), fiber friends.
Spruce green, which is actually darker than the picture shows! I was a little bummed out by how parts of the roving are dusky blue instead of green- so I did add a touch of golden yellow to the dye pot after an hour or so of watching the bamboo get darker and darker. There are still bits of dusk blue, but since I'm blending this fiber into batts, I'm not going to sweat it. Another color which always turns out marvelously is "Gold," which rinses into buttery lemony yellow.Next time, I may add a pinch of brown to make it a true gold, but I'm thrilled with this vivid chunk of bamboo. I also dyed a pound of rosy pink and another of dark gray, but I'm still waiting for those too to dry.

I have several lbs. of Procrion MX dye that I bought when a local fiber business was going out of sale, but I've put those aside in favor of Cushings direct dyes, which only require salt during the dye bath and dish soap for rinsing. The fiber rinses clear much faster than Procrion ever has for me. When my soda ash arrives, I'll crack out the Procrion dyes for my last lb. of bamboo roving.

So far, I haven't had the courage to dye Soysilk. I think it's beautiful just the way it is: warm honey-colored beige. Why screw up a good thing? Tencel is proving a bit trickier with dyes than bamboo (is it the stiffer texture?), but an extra wash with Synthropol before dyeing helped me dye a lb. of medium royal blue last week.

Today, my fiber plans are minimal. I've got to wrangle last year's taxes, finish a few batt colorways, and plot a handspun gameplan for the rest of the week. Plus, packaging and shipping has taken me nearly four hours this morning! I had a crazy-busy-battblasting weekend, for sure.

Off topic: I took a few hours last night to make something non-woolish: slippers! I used a pattern from Ithinksewdotcom. My mom made a pair too- we only improvised a little- adding batting in the soles for a bit of squish.
You can tell I haven't sewn anything in a while- my seams are hideous!

Every month I tell myself this will be the month that I remember to blog more often, but I never follow through. I usually figure that since I'm always cycling through the same routine (batts-handspun-listing-dyeing) and there's nothing really exciting to tell. This month, I'm setting a blog goal of writing at least something daily, so if you're following along, you'll see a pretty clear picture of "a month in the life of a work-from-home fiber wrangler."

Today, being Sunday, is my usual day off. I've always tried to keep one day a week totally free from fiber- and Sunday seems to work perfectly since the Post Office isn't open. I carded 30-something sets of batts in the past two days, and surprisingly, I'm really in the mood to card more- so I'm routing through my fiber collection to see what colors of Merino I have left from last Tuesday's megadye session and hoping that my bamboo is finally dry. Last night, I listed an armload of batts, including these:and my batt storage is OVERFLOWING, so before I sit down with the carder today, I'm off to buy new giant Rubbermaid tubs to keep my batts in before shipping.