Dyeing and other activities

Well, I’ve been quiet but not inactive.  Still no camera but I’ve dug a few out of Picasa which I haven’t put on my blog yet….

The weather is absolutely glorious.    The garden is lovely.  We have two red tulips which I thought I’d killed off by planting my herb garden where they were, but they seem to have come up this year, the first time for three years.    Here’s a photo of them in previous years:

I bought a couple of blueberry plants in the last two farmers’ markets in town (one at a time, all I could carry up the hill to my house!).  Here is one of them waiting on the patio to be planted out.    Our soil is very acid and apparently they like acid soils so they should do well.

Because the weather has been warm, I have been doing some natural dyeing (or at least preparing for it) over the last couple of days, so I could boil stuff up while leaving the kitchen door open.

I bought this gorgeous pencil roving from Crown Mountain Farms via a yarn coop I am in.  I want to dye it and then knit it into a bag and felt it. 

Here it is wound into skeins ready for dyeing.  Yesterday I washed it and mordanted some in alum and some in copper and picked a lot (A LOT!!) of blackberry brambles which were running wild in our front garden.  I was attacked in the forehead by a rampaging yukka plant and have lots of scratches to show for the battles with the brambles but now they have been safely boiled up and I am just waiting for the water to cool sufficiently to put one of the skeins in.  I’ve got some madder to dye some more skeins … photos when Nikon duly releases my camera!  Hopefully….