Day 14 Cleaning the Studio

Making headway in the main studio, my sewing machine if finally on my sewing table once again!

The marigold dye vat is looking gross, tomorrow I’ll be adding a heater and an air bubbler to the vat.

Lots of stuff to accomplish in the next two weeks like finish cleaning my studio and the family room, and getting my office and the dining room dealt with as well. I’m turning my office into a weaving and spinning room (I have several looms).

I’ve decided that unless a body of work I’m working on requires hand spun or hand woven fabrics that weaving and spinning are now officially relegated to the land of “that’s my hobby” so I will have a creative outlet that doesn’t also have the pressure of needing it to make income as well, this is very important for one’s creative mental health.

I’ve been hankering to do some beadwork but unfortunately me beads are blocked off by a pile of stuff that needs to be dealt with, there are days when I wish I could clone myself times three to get it all done!

Day 2 Let there be Marigolds!

Time to make the Marigold Fermentation Vat!

I started out with a clean one-gallon bucket (you can pick these up at any big box store that sells paint) and filled it with screaming hot water out of my tap. I don’t use boiling water, but you could use boiling water if you wanted to do so.

I then added my two cups of dried marigold heads, you can put them in a piece of pantyhose if you don’t want debris on your final samples. I gave the marigold heads a good squish in the water and have covered the vat with a plastic plate. I’ll check on the marigolds in an hour to see if they need to be squished with water again, they should sink to the bottom of the vat within a couple of hours.

Tomorrow I’ll add my wool samples to the vat.

Off to get groceries and do meal prep for the week. Two years ago, yesterday, I started my weight loss journey. I’m down almost 100 pounds from 331 pounds. I made a decision to change my, actually our lives that day. He’s down almost 75 pounds. We both have additional weight to lose for me it’s 85 pounds, and for him, it’s another 45 pounds.

More later on how we both lost weight.

Day 1 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge

Day 1 of the 31 Marigold Fermentation Dye Vat.

Today I made thirty-five wool loops for my dye vat, one of which will remain out of the vat as my test swatch and I will put it in a journal later. I’ll remove one loop per day from the vat, photograph it, wet and after it’s been rinsed and dried.

I really don’t have much to say today philosophically speaking, it’s a wet cold day here and to be honest I wish it would snow.

I am thinking about washing the one-gallon bucket I found in my wet studio and starting my fermentation vat. I still need to go to the store to get a fish tank bubbler for my fermentation vat.

Thoughts on Fermentation: You can do the vat one of two ways, fermentation using a bubbler to introduce oxygen into the vat, or without the bubbler. If you do it without a bubbler you will need to either seal the vat entirely with a tight fitting lid which is similar to solar dyeing and you could even use a one-gallon glass jar for this experiment, or you will have to heat it up every couple of days to prevent mold from growing in the vat. Mold will definitely shift the final colors, and quite possibly in a direction that is not desirable.

I realize that using a bubbler is not true fermentation, it is however my method of choice when utilizing a fermentation dye vat. If it were mid summer I would put the vat outside in a sunny area, and let the Sun do its magic, that said however, it’s late fall here and I really don’t want my house smelling like a swamp right now, because very often that’s what a true fermentation dye vat smells like, swamp water.

After I start my vat I’ll make up an alum mordant bath and mordant the wool loops, rinse them afterward and add them to my vat.

Where did the time go?

I’m not sure how it happened but tomorrow is December 1st which is the beginning of two separate challenges.

Challenge Number One is two write a post every day for 31 days.

Challenge Number Two is the 31 Day Marigold Fermentation Vat.

Tomorrow I shall start the vat, I still need to go to the store and purchase a fish tank bubbler for my vat, which will also utilize a fish tank heater.

And finally, create little yarn butterflies for each day of the week to be removed from the vat.

The fermentation challenge will end sometime around January 5th. The wool yarn butterflies will be pre-mordanted with alum.

Oh the smell of the woods!

I’ve been sorting through the supplies I inherited this fall when a fellow artist went into hospice, and I’m listening to George Winston’s album Forest on YouTube as I sort. My kitchen smells strongly of the woods right now, pine cones, pine needles, and oak moss lichen. I’m in heaven.

In other news the sink in my wet studio is finally functioning again so will be starting the 30 Day Fermentation vat with my dried marigolds on December 1st. Check back soon, or sign up for my newsletter, to see my progress as I get ready to set up the vat, and as I deep clean my wet studio that I abandoned early last spring when my I no longer had water in said studio.

I am participating in a 31 Day Blog Challenge for the month of December with a group of artists, so am hoping posts here each day.

Drying Marigolds

I dried the Marigold blossoms on the warm setting of my toaster oven, which I think may be around 100F for about an hour. I left over night, and this is what they looked like this morning. I’m going to let them dry for an additional day before putting them into water to start soaking.

Marigolds from Fresh to Dried

My fresh picked marigold flowers are resting on a piece of parchment paper and I will place them in my toaster oven on warm. In a couple of hours they will be dried enough to add to a gallon of warm water.