We went back to our now favorite u-pick-em farm this weekend and gathered lots and lots of blueberries. 2 pounds for 3 bucks in 1 hour. Not bad, eh?
We had blueberry-banana pancakes for breakfast and blueberry frozen yogurt for dessert. Lots and lots of that vitamin C and vitamin K and anthocyanin and manganese and flavonol and who are we kidding–we ate em cuz they taste good!
Well, I was playing chemist, anyway. Bill of course was in his element this weekend when we took a workshop on natural dyes for yarn. We drove 3 hours on Saturday to the Midwest Fiber & Folk Art Fair to learn how to turn our front yard into something useful. And it was so much fun!! We started with flowers–the kind that really do grow in your front yard or, sometimes more likely, along the shoulder of the highway. Chop em up in the Cuisinart and boil em in some water for an hour and a half. Take out the solid stuff and put in undyed yarn for an hour. And abracadabra! Colored yarn!
Most of the flowers from around the area will give you oranges and yellows. (There are roots and wood and insects that give redder hues, but who wants to pull up a plant or chop down a tree or **ack** crush up bugs when you could just clip flowers?) Below are the yellows we ended up with. From left to right: Queen Anne’s lace, marigold, weld, golden margarite, and bee balm.
We then took these colors and overdyed with madder, which gives the rusty reds, and indigo, which gave us (yellow + blue =) greens and turquoises.
Indigo was especially interesting and chemistry-ish. There’s all sorts of pH measuring and temperature taking and adding thiourea and soda ash and it smells terrible. The cool thing about indigo is that its color results from the oxidation of some chemical (see, I told you I was only playing at chemist); the dye actually looks a swampy green. Then when the chemical is exposed to oxygen, it turns into blue. So you put the yarn into the oil-slick-looking vat for 15 minutes and when you take it out, it turns from pukey green to denim blue in front of your eyes, just like a hypercolor shirt from days of yore. Each time someone took yarn out of the indigo vat, everyone really did audibly “ooooo,” because it’s really like real magic!
I, of course, am very lucky because there were 2 of us, meaning I get twice as much yarn to knit with as others in the workshop. I haven’t decided what to do with it yet. It’s not very soft wool, but it is worsted weight, so pretty thick. I’ll post the finished product, whenever whatever it is is done. For now, you can just “ooooo” at all the pretty colors.
And hell-llo ruby cruise-way!
The Subaru has now been donated and trucked away. And the Honda* is safe and sound in our garage.
In’it cute?
*A 2008 Honda Fit, boasting 28 mpg in city and 34 on highway, a deceptively roomy backseat and way-back, and incredibly versatile storage capabilities.
My drive to work this morning was a spectacle of clouds. I’ve never seen cloud behavior like this.* And this requires audience participation, so get a pen and some scratch paper.
When I left the house, the sky was the drab gauzy gray of humidity. A solid slate of steam from horizon to horizon. Now draw an arc across your paper from the top third on the left to the bottom third on the right, like a lop-sided rainbow. Imagine the bottom of your paper is the dark gray of storm clouds, but without any texture. Imagine the top of your paper is still the light gray matte of morning clouds. This is literally what the sky looked like a block from work. I’ve never seen clouds behave this way. There was really a line in the middle of the sky with distinct colors on either side. Never seen this before!
Now take your pen again, and across the bottom part of the page and up through your arc, draw like you’re trying to get a pen to write. Lots of big spirals. Take it higher and higher up the page until the full page is broiling with spirals. Within a block, the line in the sky was obliterated by stormy stormy clouds. The top clouds were lifted like a theater curtain to reveal the stage of thunderstorms. Like blowing sand off the top of a picnic table. Or the first strokes of icing a white cake with chocolate frosting.
By the time I parked in the parking lot, there was a stiff wind blowing spitting rain and the clouds were like lots of Poohs (“I’m just a little black raincloud”), bunches of them lower in the atmosphere, with the rain-all-day gray clouds higher. And now a steady drizzle from that rain-all-day drape. (You could turn your paper over to the blank side, if you want a visual.)
Like I said, really weird cloud behavior. But super cool!
*Don’t worry. I was listening to the radio and knew there was a thunderstorm watch; no tornados or anything scary.
Magrilless 