gather and grow

As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a fairly serious fiber crafts kick lately. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes get completely hooked on a project or a craft, and want to do only that for a good while. This fall, it’s been spinning and dyeing yarn. I realize there are people — and that includes many of my readers — who don’t automatically start drooling at the sight of wool yarn, no matter how pretty. And so I promise I’m soon going to turn to other topics for a while, after this one last post!

You see, after the indigo project, I came up with a certain idea for holiday gifts, and decided I still needed some more colors to be able to make it into a reality. I had the materials, and still enough steam in me, for one more a natural dyeing extravaganza. So I spent much of last weekend dyeing purples and lavenders with logwood, reds with brazilwood, and yellows and oranges with cota. Once the rinsing and drying was done, I found myself with skeins upon skeins of gorgeous blues, purples, reds, oranges, and yellows. These are some of the brightest, boldest colors I’ve been able to create so far, and will be perfect for cheering up a gloomy winter’s day. For the yarn, I’ve been using the Bare Wool of the Andes in natural, which takes on color beautifully. The logwood and the brazilwood I got from here and the cota from here.

Now the natural dyeing workshop over here has closed for the winter, and I’m going to cast on and start knitting. This year, my family will find under the tree some hand-knits, in these very colors… and I’ll be able to tell exactly where each color came from.