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Well, I was playing chemist, anyway. Bill of course was in his element this weekend when we took a workshop on natural dyes for yarn. We drove 3 hours on Saturday to the Midwest Fiber & Folk Art Fair to learn how to turn our front yard into something useful. And it was so much fun!! We started with flowers--the kind that really do grow in your front yard or, sometimes more likely, along the shoulder of the highway. Chop em up in the Cuisinart and boil em in some water for an hour and a half. Take out the solid stuff and put in undyed yarn for an hour. And abracadabra! Colored yarn!
Most of the flowers from around the area will give you oranges and yellows. (There are roots and wood and insects that give redder hues, but who wants to pull up a plant or chop down a tree or **ack** crush up bugs when you could just clip flowers?) Below are the yellows we ended up with. From left to right: Queen Anne's lace, marigold, weld, golden margarite, and bee balm.
We then took these colors and overdyed with madder, which gives the rusty reds, and indigo, which gave us (yellow + blue =) greens and turquoises.
Indigo was especially interesting and chemistry-ish. There's all sorts of pH measuring and temperature taking and adding thiourea and soda ash and it smells terrible. The cool thing about indigo is that its color results from the oxidation of some chemical (see, I told you I was only playing at chemist); the dye actually looks a swampy green. Then when the chemical is exposed to oxygen, it turns into blue. So you put the yarn into the oil-slick-looking vat for 15 minutes and when you take it out, it turns from pukey green to denim blue in front of your eyes, just like a hypercolor shirt from days of yore. Each time someone took yarn out of the indigo vat, everyone really did audibly "ooooo," because it's really like real magic!
I, of course, am very lucky because there were 2 of us, meaning I get twice as much yarn to knit with as others in the workshop. I haven't decided what to do with it yet. It's not very soft wool, but it is worsted weight, so pretty thick. I'll post the finished product, whenever whatever it is is done. For now, you can just "ooooo" at all the pretty colors.
