The Omniart Notebook

I Cherish the Sheep They say every spinner eventually gets curious about other fibers than wool.  With me, it turns out the other way around. First, I try various other animal and plant fibers: The neighbor’s mountaineering pack llama fleece.  My friend’s prize winning alpaca fleece.  The guard llama, Blue, down the road from us, who ferociously watches over his own little sheep flock.   The family dog. The pet angora rabbit. The angora goats we had for a while, before they tried to eat all of the native flowers on the land, and we gave them to another sanctuary farm, run by a friends who had a lot of invasive plants to for them to gleefully chew through.  The cashmere goats we babysat, for a friend, for a few months. Exotic animals; yak, camel,  qiviut,  etc. Flax. Organic natural colored cotton. Rayon.  Hemp. Silk. Then raw silk, in which no harm is done to the silkworms. The abandoned cocoons are gathered, picked from the mulberry trees, a...

Homepathic Dye Experiment I am playing with colors again. I take a pinch of dye and dissolve it in a quarter cup of water. I pour half in a tiny little jar in the crockpot with a bit of fleece. I’m working with merino staples and a few stunning  teeswater twelve inch long curly locks I just got.  With half of my dye left, I stir water in the mixing pitcher back to the same quarter cup level. Half of this goes into the next little jar. The third jar gets half as much as the previous one, and so on, until jar number six, which is so diluted that the water barely shows any color at all! The orange dye at full strength turns the fleece almost red, but is quite yellow at the end, at the last dilution. Turquoise is lovely and deep at the first jar, but a pale minty green at the end of the line. Pink just keeps getting paler… “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson