Roving Buns - LOL

My roving has dried so I braided it. Pretty nice if I say so myself :)

Natural Dyeing

The second class I took was dyeing with natural extracts - we used cochineal, madder, fustic, Osage orange, lockwood and Indigo. We had 8 1oz skeins to dye. The cochineal we used Alum as the mordant and after we'd all dipped a skein the teacher added Cream of Tartar which turned the dye from burgundy/wine to a wonderful scarlet. I dyed two skeins in the Osage and then over-dyed one in the Indigo getting a wonderful leaf green. Judy is a WONDERFUL teacher and I'd love to take more classes with her.

FINALLY an Update

I know I've been a VERY bad blogger (hanging my head) but today that changes ! I recently joined the local spinning guild in time to take part in their annual class day. There were a few classes I wanted to take bu decided on the two dyeing classes being offered by Judy Ness - a fiber arts teacher from Eugene, Oregon. She's taught at Black Sheep and OFFF. The classes I chose were crockpot dyeing and dyeing with natural extracts. The natural extract class was kind of an after-thought but turned out to be the class I liked better.

My first round of crock pot roving came out with too many white spots because I packed the pot with too much fiber - lesson learned. The second round was much better.