27th August 2009

Turning blue...

No.. I was not holding my breath or anything. This morning one of my friends in Oregon who also does SCA stuff invited me to her home near where I am staying as she has a dyepot going of indigo and invited me to come dye with her. I did not have anything readily available to dye (as everything is packed in a storage locker), although I thought about taking the white socks off my feet and tossing them in. After looking at the state of my socks from walking across the garage floor, I decided to hold out until I had something more suitable.

We ended up dyeing.... handspun silk skeins, handspun wool skeins, 30+ yards of real linen, many yards of brocade, Brigit's handspun/handknitted socks, her shorts she hated, and a few other odds and ends.

There was trouble getting the vat, which was not merely a kettle, but a whole BATHTUB, to the right pH for a couple of hours, but then it finally made its chemical magic happen.

Several other people in our group dropped by to drop various materials off to be dyed and her yard was a sea of blue hanging from makeshift laundry lines and anything else we could use to hang something from.

I put a few of the highlights in my photo album here for you to see what we did today. The red is Cochineal that she did a week ago and the green one next to the Cochineal is indigo topdyed over something else to get the green.

Photo Above: Cochenial dyed yarns
Photo Below: The Indigo dyebath. It can last 100's of years.

Photo Above: My friend "B" working in the indigo dyebath in her backyard
Photo Below: The yarn just out of the dyebath for seconds. It gets blue by exposure to oxygen.

Photo Above: The indigo dyed yarn out of the dyebath 30 seconds.
Photo Below: The yarn out for approximently 2 minutes.

Photo Above: Five minutes out of the dyebath.
Photo Below: Me, rather pregnant pulling yarn
out of the dyebath. It was hot so I did not do alot
that day, but temptation of wanting to help too took over.