A Dyers Retreat

Phew! What a weekend! I just took out my last batch of dye. It was awesome. There were 7 of us and there was dyeing going on all over the place.... colour all over the place.... and smiles all over the place. The sun shone, the wind blew, and we just dyed.... (no pun intended.... well maybe a little pun intended). I was given gifts, which was totally unexpected.... this hand painted banner was one of them....

I finished all my cleaning on Friday before lunch and the house and the deck with all it flowers looked absolutely great!...


I had started on Friday evening after the first of my guests arrived by dyeing pots of fibre on the stove in a variety of dyes. I was using Gaywool Dyes and by 11 p.m. I had tried out a whole bunch of colours, and had laid them out on the deck to dry.... don't they look delicious...?


Now I don't know if you are aware but this weekend there was a full moon so I was at my best for working till late into the night. The moon rose over the trees and made a radiant debut to us all and so we had to worship the moon in all it's glory with a little moonlight Chi Gong on the front lawn. This picture was taken as I came back from the moon worshiping. I just happened along in time to see the moon rising above the trees from the deck with the fire place and this wheel and a little of the fibre that I had dyed earlier in the evening.

The lady in the hat was our Chi Gong leader.....

We went to our beds with busy minds occupied with colour for our wool and silk.... this was fibre belonging to MF who showed up at 1:10 a.m. in the morning on Friday night/Saturday morning just as we were heading off to bed.... now that's dedication to drive so late at night to be here for dyeing.... well, at least I think so...

Some slept in tents... some slept in tent trailers, and some just slept in their car......

This lady.....

even brought her kitchen sink.... awesome set up, LS...

Saturday morning started out quite hot and windy. Things kept blowing around... but at least there weren't any mosquitoes... so we ate breakfast and got down to it.....

After breakfast, MW and I got down to it and started to work on our level 4 dyeing for the Master Spinner program... There were books all over the table as we methodically worked our way through the questions....

First, we did our Ombre dyeing.... and got very nice results.....

Then we tackled our colour wheel and could only do it in small amounts, so these are our first seven of twelve results....

All of our colour wheel skeins and our Ombre skeins look so lovely here that I couldn't help taking another picture.....

Meanwhile dyeing was taking over the deck.... there were pots brewing......

and more pots brewing.....

See those smiling faces.... well that's because there's all kinds of stuff brewing.....

This is NC measuring out the powder dyes....

And then the results started to role in.....
Now is that not an awesome display of colour... and creativity....

Some of us had worked really hard on that very hot windy day and so it was nice to find a quiet corner to yourself.... doesn't this look peaceful?

Books and magazines were hot topics..... and the short break in out of the elements meant for a few moments of time away from the sun.....

That evening there was more moon worshiping and and some of us couldn't hold up any longer after a day of hot sun and all that fresh air.... I for one was totally exhausted.... and somewhat dehydrated.... so the next day we put up a tarp over the deck to shade us somewhat.

The dyeing continued as one after another fooled around with colour and fibre..... what better way to spend a day? Sunday was a day of spinning for me since I still needed 8 skeins to finish my level 4 dyeing samples..... ahhh percentage dyeing is really quite fun!.... But as the day progressed on Sunday I knew I wasn't going to finish the spinning in time to get the dyeing done that day.... so MW stayed an extra night and then this morning we got up and carried on....

It was really nice because it was a whole lot cooler and a whole lot less windy.....
So here are the results from today....

This is Wensleydale (wool), silk, mohair, cashgora, and BFL rovings all coloured with beautiful colours....

Silk hankies and wool rovings with slightly different colours.

And a small amount of merino fleece....

And my favorite part..... my percentage dyeing.... which I am currently working on using in a knitted hat that I started tonight.... mostly because I'm just too tired to do anything else.


One last batch of dye is cooling on the counter.... I'm done... finito..... till next year..... boy that seems like such a long way off..... boo hoo, sob, sob.... that's not faaaaaiiiirrrr! : (

It was so sad to see everyone leaving on Sunday evening.... I'm so glad that MW stayed the extra day. It gave me a little bit of a buffer from feeling totally abandoned.

But I have so much lovely stuff to do between now and next year's retreat.... still, I can't wait till next year.....

Bad... bad... bad....

Yeah, so house work sucks... I got some of it done but there's a whole lot more to do. I did lose two hours to playing with my new look on this blog..... oh that was a seriously dangerous activity.... I could have played with it for hours... you know tweaking this and tweaking that. But in the end Daughter #2 kicked me off the computer with a reminder that I was the mom and she was supposed to waste time like that and I was supposed to get her off the computer..... (Oh but it was fun)!

Now I have to pay the piper because there are still little piles of dust bunnies etc... all over the floor that I have partially swept up but need to get transferred to the garbage can. My office looks awesome and so does the spinning room, but the dining room looks blah.... so that needs to be cleaned. The living room is getting there but I have to move the burl and sweep out that corner.... My bathroom and my kitchen are both looking quite good but the deck needs an overhaul.... So while things are looking better I'm basically a slob..... and hopefully no one will have to use the upstairs bathroom because it is terrible. I even watched a movie last night instead of cleaning... bad, bad, bad!

I have coffee brewing and the smell is delicious. I have Coopworth on the wheel (that's wool for you non-spinners). I have two nice spools with my 8 tpi waiting to be plied.... I wonder if it will be 8 tpi! I have a charkha with 15 tpi in silk waiting to have the second spool done and an email from one of my fellow Master Spinner wannabes who just got her mark back on her level 3 and she got 95%... like that is so awesome....! I'm terribly anxious every time I think about it. There's a lovely little breeze making it not too hot, and the dog hasn't run off this morning... it's an awesome morning.

Still though there's a pile of work to be done and I need to get to it. I'm expecting my retreaters today around right after lunch, and what really makes me feel ticked is that I don't have a camera to take pictures of it all. I will have to use my pathetic phone camera..... or hope that someone else brings a digital and their cords to download pictures. Still though I will try to capture some images even if I have to drag this computer outside and take pictures with it!

If you live in the vicinity and would like to come by and see what we are up to.... well you're welcome and all of you who are not in the vicinity... well then na na na boo boo!

Oh I'm bad, bad, bad.... (hopefully in a nice way though). : )

Ye Olde Batt Gets A Face Lift

OH MY G-- I am having sooo much fun....!

Hope you like the new look.

Jobs To Do And Someone's Got To Do Them!

This morning it is quite nice and a little cool. Sometime overnight there must have been a deluge. The deck is wet again which is awesome since, with the rain we had the other day, and this little soaking, we might start to see the grass begin to grow again. I actually do see a little green among the brown and gold. Honestly though, I do think that it will take several days of rain to bring back the grass from the brink of extinction. Besides, it is too late for the farmers and their hay crops for this year.

But sitting here this morning with the freshness of the new wet ground surrounding me is feeling pretty darn good.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the retreat that I host each summer. I will be preparing dye solutions today and cleaning house. The dye solutions shouldn't take very long and I will do that out on the deck. The cleaning house will take longer. Suffice it to say that while I was away in Olds not a whole lot was done to keep the house relatively nice. Then, when I returned, I had spinning and level 3 on my mind, not to mention other things. The heat also zaps me of wanting to do anything regarding house keeping (I actually think watching a kindergartner pick his nose would be more pleasurable than housework). All that has been done here for the last few weeks is the bare essentials, and so today, I will have to pay the piper and actually make it look like a care how clean my floors are and whether the toilet seat is touchable!

Actually I started cleaning last night, and started with the front sunroom. For weeks Teapot has been working on transferring over all the files on one computer to our new computer and he has basically not wanted me to touch anything.... oh well, that's out the window now because I moved both of the computers on to a new desk and unplugged the whole works of it..... : } Still, it needed to be done because there was a terrible amount of dust and old bills that needed sorting.

Then there is the dining room table which now has a whole lot of stuff from Olds sitting on it. I want to go through all of that stuff and put away the stuff that I didn't get to a couple of weeks ago. In the process, I went through a few other things too. I fished out the rug that I was hooking last summer and haven't had time to work on recently and thought about doing some this weekend. I do love to go through my stash because I find all kinds of things that I had forgotten about. I had originally wanted to finish the rug before I went to Olds this year but rug hooking is not in the forefront of my mind. While I do enjoy hooking rugs, and hope to finsh more than just this one, I know it will never consume every waking hour the way spinning does. It just is something pleasant to do with my time.... (what time you ask?... you know, the reams of time that I have after everything else is done)! I have even decided to take the big 7 foot tri loom out and try to get a few picks done each day like I did last year. It was progressing quite nicely when I did that and then the big j.c. got in the way of that too. And then there is the quilt that I am working on for my sponsored child in Peru... it is a quilt that I hand stitched and put together and all it needs is the backing and quilting done. It would be nice to finish it this year.

Actually, I am beginning to understand why Teapot distracts me every time I start to go through my stash... I'm sure it's because out come all the old projects that haven't been finished and need to be done-something-with and they sit around having very-little-done until such time as I get sick of looking at them and then they get put away again. Well, I am making an online pact..... I am pledging a little time every day to work on these projects and by the time I go to Olds next year I have to have at least two of these projects done and have the third one partially finished..... and it can't get in the way of finishing my homework.... that's always the priority.... yeah... so there!!.... (am I crazy?!!!)

Ok so a few minutes was needed there to restart my heart with the plug from the computer..... and now I think I'll go call the doc and let him know that I am ready for that lobotomy.

Deep breathing.... deep breathing.... ok, I can do this right? Finish two of three projects and make inroads into the third one.... right.... it's not unachievable... right?!!!!! Gee, I was having a lovely morning until I opened my brute sized mouth..... oh well, what's life without a few challenges...... " I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..."

Well, if I am going to do this then I had better get to it.... no time like the present to put your money where your mouth is..... any bets?!!!!

Too, too.....

Thank God for Cameron Lake.... without it we would all die of heat stroke. Once again the wind and dry, hot weather is rearing it's ugly head. I hate the cold winter but I really hate living where it is so dry that the grass dies mid-way through the summer and the grass hoppers arrive in droves. My two favorite times of the year are spring and fall not necessarily in that order. Fall is a wonderful time because of the colours and no bugs and it is still warm but not hot and those pesky mosquitoes are dead and so are the hornets and the grasshoppers are dieing too. I love spring too because there is still frost in the mornings and the ground has moisture from the winter snows and the sun is bright but not blaringly so, and there are lambs. Winter is too cold around here, and I tend to hibernate, which is not a bad thing for a spinner because I tend to get a lot of work done. But even winter is tolerable when the sun is out and the air is frozen and there are crystals in the air or the moon is white in the deep blue sky at 4 p.m. However, summer just sucks! Too hot, too dead, too bright, too much dry thunder, too much threat of forest fire, too crunchy, too many complaining needy animals, too many clouds and not enough rain, and too tiring.

Without Cameron Lake I would just want to hibernate in summer too. I mentioned Cameron Lake the other night and told you about our lovely day by and on the Lake. Today was another of those days. Teapot is gone and it was too not-a-day-to-work, so the girls and I headed off for an afternoon of swimming and kayaking. The only problem was that we didn't have a key to the gate to get to the Outdoor Centre.... no problem, I thought, we'll go to the park side of the lake. Yeah! Right! Too busy. So the Daughters and I headed back to the Outdoor Centre. We parked at the gate, which we were able to scale, and took our gear including the heavy (well ok maybe not that heavy) kayak and tramped our way to the beach (gravel) which was a kilometre away.

This worked better than you think. We paddled about, well at least Daughter #1 did and we went swimming and we had another picnic supper, and just as we were about to have another swim, the thunder came with a resounding crash and no warning at all. Ok so swimming and kayaking were now out of the question and then the before-a-thunderstorm mosquitoes hit.... it was a swarm and in no time we felt our best option was to head back to the truck a kilometre away, especially since Jiggs was acting like a proverbial nut (she chewed through her leash twice and wanted to hide in the bush from the thunder).

We high tailed it as fast as our little feet could back to the gate with the marauding mosquitoes chomping on us all of the way.... thunder was crashing behind us and we knew that it was only a matter of time before we were hit with the rain and wind of the oncoming storm....

Suffice it to say that we made it with a little less blood (mosquitoes) and a whole lot more agony (carrying the kayak that far is not easy) and headed home. Not exactly the great day I had hoped for but at least better than roasting in the oven here at home, listening to hungry sheep that have no grass to eat because the grasshoppers have eaten what didn't burn up in this draught (the hay is not what they want).

Basically summer is too too everything bad....

It's cool now at 10 p.m. and the grasshoppers are sleeping, so I am going out on my deck to try that 8 t.p.i. in the near dark..... before I go too crazy!

Grammar

I must apologize for the terrible grammar in my last post. I should have realized right away how bad it was. But I didn't. So by the time I realized my mistakes..... well it had been posted already and you all had a chance to see how terrible I actually am at writing!

In the inestimable words of my mother's and father's grade school teacher, Murphy (not Mister), whose reputation has reached epic proportions in our family, and who, I might add, was a Newfy, (they grew up in a town with a one room school house), "It is no good, for I to teach youse no English."

Is there such a word as "youse"?!!! : )

Several Things At Once

Teapot just left. He's off for the next eleven days to Cochrane, Alberta for an opportunity of herding kids through leadership activities for the JCRs. There will be some 30 kids from age 16 - 18 who will be doing mountaineering, repelling, kayaking (in white water I might add), as well as wilderness biking skills training. In addition, each individual JCR will be assigned a group and that group will have to come up with a challenging activity that they will have to lead and organize. It is an awesome camp. Daughter #1 will be eligible to apply to go some day.... I hope she gets a chance.

As Teapot headed out the door, it suddenly dawned on me that he was taking his camera with him. This, under normal circumstances, would not be a problem but mine has died and I actually took some photos yesterday, on his camera, of things that I wanted to post here and unfortunately he is gone with them still on his camera. You see yesterday was a lovely day, which you will see as you continue to read.

I have been struggling with the summer idleness of the Daughters and finding it difficult to cope with. But yesterday I got that in hand by having a heart to heart with them. (I kicked them out of bed by 11 a.m.). We discussed things that they could be doing during the summer instead of reading incessantly. So Daughter #1 called her friend and headed off for a full afternoon of riding and visiting with her friend. Dreamer, her horse got a good workout and Daughter #1 didn't laze around all day. Daughter #2 called her friend and they went hiking the creek that runs along the edge of the subdivision that we live in. They both came home thoroughly worn out which is how teenagers should feel at the end of a day in summer. Part of that heart to heart discussion was that I also have decided to put them to work for me.

Now here I have to do a little explaining. First of all Teapot and I did a big re-evaluation of our lives in the spring and we both decided that the carding mill that I had bought was not part of it nor are my sheep. The sheep drive us crazy as they are way more demanding than the alpacas. (They baa all the time even at night and when it is summer and you sleep with the window open this is a miserable affair). With the sheep, you have to bend over in order to shear while the alpacas will allow themselves to be wrestled onto a table making two people with terrible back issues much happier shearing alpacas than trying to shear those sheep on the ground. I have decided to keep a very small flock of sheep and only breed enough to keep my family fed with lamb. I have chosen seven sheep to keep. (I have 24 right now!) I sold the mill with the intention of fencing more of our property so that I could better feed the animals I have. Hay is at a premium price and now we have the added problem that our usual supplier will not be able to supply us any hay at all this year... so we are scrambling and trying to find another supplier. This is not proving to be easy. We may have to butcher all of our sheep. (This would really bother me though since there are several that I really like). When we did this re-evaluation of our lives Teapot and I admitted that we are not getting younger and choosing the way for our lives for the next ten years will mean looking forward with some serious foresight. I do not want to spend the next ten years of my life in some dark shed (which is where the mill would have to go) washing, carding, and prepping fibre for other people. The thoughts of large equipment that is loud and dirty is not really appealing.

It was while I was on my way home from Olds that I had a better idea of what I wanted to do with all the wool and alpaca fibre that I have lying around. One of the things that I have noticed about prepared fibre is that more often than not it is over processed. (Mill processed is sometime overprocessed). There is something really nice about knowing what was used to wash the fibre that you are spinning. Besides, hand prepared fibre has a nicer feel. It has not been treated with harsh chemicals and it has not been stretched, or be man handled in any way. So I thought based on that, that perhaps I wasn't the only one out there with this thought, and if there were others out there like me... that hand washed and prepped fibre might be appealing to a niche market. So, I want to start a little business for myself which I will call Heritage Fibres where I will prep the fibres the old fashioned way.... that is where the Daughters come in.... the Daughters can help for a take of the profits.

Prepping and washing fibre is not a job for the faint of heart. The finer the fleece the more time it takes to clean.... you do not want the stuff to be felted in the process. So the Daughters and I are going to work today to prep, wash, comb, dye, blend, etc... all fibres and blends that I deem fit. Believe me I have plenty of fibres to handle.

In the meantime, yesterday I finished spinning a pile of fibre for the dyeing retreat coming up this weekend. I spent the whole day out on the deck having fun (this brings me back to yesterday being a great day) and while I was there I had a visit from a Hummingbird. I thought this was wonderful since the Hummingbirds have not been coming around as much since the weather has turned dry and windy, but after all the rain we had two days ago, they seemed to be happy to come to the pots of flowers on the deck for a visit. One little fellow got quite ferocious and landed on the rope that holds the tarp covering the deck in an effort to stave off any other marauding Hummingbirds that might want to come to check it out for food. He was quite a chubby little fellow and I decided to name him Dim Sum. He was there for over an hour, braving the dogs and cats, and would hover at times, quite close to me before going back to land on the rope. I did have pictures of him but those are the ones that Teapot has departed with.

I finished plying all that yarn I spun yesterday on the deck and this morning, while I was plying I kept looking at my 8 t.p.i. skein of yarn hanging on my Lazy Kate that I had spun last week, you know... the one that I was most satisfied with.... after looking at it for hours yesterday, I have decided it sucks and I need to redo it!

So call me crazy, call me camera-less, call me Teapot-less, call me business woman with a hopeful idea.... but don't you hate it when I cover several things at once?

It's just sooo confusing.....