I know. I know. If I couldn’t have gotten it posted earlier I would have. But that’s life for you.
Hi, everybody! I actually started a post ten days ago, but well… that didn’t happen. So what I’m going to do is cull my photo folder and see what’s been going on that’s taken up so much of my time.
First, I have to thank our friend Margaret for this wonderful bowl of pansies. They’re gorgeous, and they’ve just brightened up both the deck and the dining room that opens onto the deck.
This, friends and neighbors, is Targhee combed top in an acid bath prior to dyeing. It’s not terribly pretty, but it made an odd photo, so there you have it. I wound up hand-painting this sucker in a couple of shades of green, some rust, khaki, brown, and a little pop of purple.
Sound peculiar?
Well, it turned out great! That’s eight ounces, and it’s very tightly combed. Somehow, it’s still huge. I left my coffee mug on the table for perspective. I can’t wait to see it spun.
But in all fairness, that wasn’t my first try. I also painted a couple of small bumps the day before to work out the process and make sure I wasn’t going to have a big ugly mess.
Case in point: the turban of hand-painted Brown Sheep Beast that appeared on Rob’s blog sometime back. It felted horribly, and I wound up having to run it through a drum carder to get anything back out of it. All the dyeing work on it is now all mixed up, so it looks like grey. That was the first try.
The photo on top to the left is my second try. There’s not much of it, but it’s much nicer. It’s the first of the Targhee that I painted.
The second photo (and my personal favorite) is the third try and the last before I wound out an eight-ounce bump. I’m still not terribly satisfied with the saturation on the eight-ounce bump, but I like it. I know now how I’d modify the process to get fewer areas where there isn’t much color at all.
Koigu’s Charlotte’s Web Shawl has also been very popular. We’ve had several orders for them, so I started putting together pre-developed colorways so that I could show them to people when they inquire. There still needs to be several more, but I’m working on that, too.
One last thing, and I’ll go run my afternoon errands.
In my review of photos, I found this picture that Rob took of me dyeing quite some time back. It’s quite a good photograph, in my opinion, but neither the artistic merit nor the quality of the photograph itself is what grabs my attention.
Vanity, though art truly God.
Are my arms really that hairy?!?
