Yellow

When I ask students which colors they think will be the easiest to get, when dyeing with natural dyes, invariably they always say Yellow or Brown.

Oh how I wish this were true. Want red, blue or purple? I'm your dyer then, want yellow or a deep deep brown, better find someone else to do your dyeing for you! I don't know why but I always get a dingy yellow, it doesn't seem to matter what techniques I use, how clean the pot, the perfect temps for the perscribed period of time it always comes out blahhh. I'm thinking it HAS to be the water then. I'm going to try yellow with some distilled water to see what happends, who knows maybe i"ll get a strikining golden yellow.

I'll keep and probably use these quills for something, but dingy yellow wasn't want I was aiming for this weekend.

On Surviving Winter

Well unless you live in a cave somewhere with absolutely no contact what so ever with the outside world then you know that heating costs are going to go up this winter. So the question begs to be anwsered how do I keep warm. It's very simple:

Wear lots of clothes!

I keep our house at 58 F. That's right I keep it at 58 degrees F! In the morning I get up, around 6ish, to fix hubbys lunch make the coffee and let the dogs out to do their chores. In the winter I turn the heat up to 62 F and let it run one full cycle. I then turn it back down to 58 F and don't turn it back up until 5 or 6 in the evening. I let it run one full cycle again and turn it down. Sometimes we will turn it up before we go to bed one more time. I personally cna't sleep if it's warmer than 62 F in the house. My house is heavily insulated with woolrock, an insulation material that was used around the turn of the previous century. Woolrock maintains it's temperatures beautifully. I can go several days, w/o running the furnace before the house temp hits 50 F, ask me how I know and it wasn't our choice either.

So by now you either think I'm nuts, full of it, or both. I'm only nuts. I'm also cheap (frugal). And I really hate getting sick, warm buildings in the winter breed disease.

So how do you keep warm Kimberly - we have to ask???

Wool, wool is our best friend. We both wear turtle necks or long sleeve tee shirts, wool shirts or wool sweaters. When it's warmer out we wear cotton long sleeve shirts, flannel or heavy cotton twill, over our tees. We wear lots of wool socks, and I've been known to wear a wool hat indoors on occassion. My head is usually cold but the rest of me is hot. I wear wool socks starting now until spring thaw, I buy them and I also knit them myself.

As for staying warm at night, flannel sheets, wool blankets, thick heavy comforters - get the picture. If you wanna stay warm then cover up!

I heard one source state that the recommeneded lowering of the furnace temp be to 68 F, that's sweltering! Personally I don't take that as a serious drop that would amount to any type of savings in fuel oil and natural gas. 62 F is a serious drop and should create a serious savings. But hey I don't make the rules so what do I know right! I can say this it's only been in the last 50 years or so that we've had these ridiculously high indoor temps during the winter. Prior to that people froze their arses off in the winter.

Yellow, Finally!

I finally got a yellow on the quills. So being inspired this afternoon I'm going to dye some quills with indigo and overdye with the Osage, to see if I can get a green or teal color. The replacement batch of quills is working wonderfully.

Quills have an almost magical property to them. You can pull quills out of the same exact location on a hide and the quills for one side will dye beautifully, the quills from the other side dyes marginally - if they take color at all. I have about 5 ounce of quills that flat out refused to take any dye at all. So I need to come up with a project that uses a lot of white quills1
Now to figure out how to store these once sorted by size.