sutton075

While camping last weekend at Parker's Creek we had a beautiful site right on the lake, a terrific climbing log and lots of cool mushrooms.  Riley and I tromped through the woods collecting all the different kinds of mushrooms we could find.  It was great fun, smelly slimy but fun. I dutifully did research for the proper methods, there are many sites about dyeing wool with mushrooms. I placed my chopped up mushrooms into jars, filled the jars with water and let them "steep" in the sun for two days. Strained the extremely slimy and smelly mushrooms and placed them in cheesecloth.  Scoured and mordanted 40 grams of wool yarn. Brought mushroom/ yarn up to 170 degrees and held it for one hour. Soaked overnight and VOILA! Five of the most uninspiring shades of beige yarn ever produced. Bonus, it smelled so bad even after multiple washings... I threw it out!

I may need to explain a bit.  My sister, Janet and I made a commitment to one another.  It was over breakfast at First Watch in Deerfield Beach in August 2016.  We each had dreams that we were procrastinating pursuing.  Janet was a writer and as most writers had trouble dedicating time to write without distraction.  I am an aspiring tapestry weaver with exactly the same problem. One of my favorite authors Anne Lamott when asked about waiting for inspiration said no writer waits for inspiration.  You sit down and do what it takes to "keep your big fabulous butt in the chair " and write.  I shared this with Janet and we decided to commit to being accountability partners, calling each other weekly with a butt in chair or BIC report.  Her goal was a writing submission and mine was to enter a tapestry in a juried show. We faithfully did our BIC reports and reviewed the ways we kept ourselves from spending time writing and weaving.  We encouraged a...

Today was a beautiful North Carolina day, cool breezes, cloudless sky and sunshine.  Too beautiful to be inside weaving or doing chores.  A perfect day to fire up the indigo pot.  I purchased a huge lot of rug yarn on Ravelry with the intent to play with some natural dyes. Nice natural wool I also had some tapestry yarns in white, gray, yellow and a funky green. The first two skeins are wrapped with plastic for an experiment in space dyeing. I am pleased with the variety of greens and blues I achieved. Fresh from the vat. Not a total success, there was some bleeding under the plastic. Ready to sample.  The intervals of wrapping were varied, more blue on the right. Interesting striping in this sample wedge. I am currently working on a design for my second wedge weave.  Deciding on the dimension is giving me pause right now.  I am more comfortable with the small format but want to go big.