In between taking care of Mom and having a lot of windshield time, I have been playing in the dye studio. For some reason I seem to by stuck in the 70’s as far as colors..way too many neutrals and naturals. So I attempted to add some zing to the silver gray fleeces I had to work with. Now keep in mind you will have to picture this because I broke my digi camera this morning, so there are no photos!

I have blended this silver gray wool with about an 1/8 mohair and dyed it a rich Raspberry. The plan is to spin it up and then ply it with a single ply of natural gray. The test spinning that I did produced a gorgeous very soft, loose spun yarn that I could easily see a jacket made out of it. More specifically, a boiled wool jacket. Now that I have stopped dying my own hair (hehe) I find myself wanting to blend more colors that go with gray..this one does it beautifully!

The next dye job that I’ve put a lot of effort into is using a Royal Blue, again, with this silver gray fleece. For this I did things a bit different. I used 1/2 of the wool and then blended separately mohair, alpaca and cashmere. I over dyed the wool in Royal and then dyed the 3 blended fibers, blend all of the fibers and hated it! So, it was back to the drawing board. I spun the the over dyed into a single and the blended into a single and plyed those together..yuck! I gave a lot of consideration to dying the whole mess black, then I thought about the “chafe” wool that I had saved off of the same silver gray sheep. I took the “chafe” and over dyed it in a Salmon color. Once it was dry, I went after it with scissors and chopped it into a dense dust. I went ahead and blended all of the fibers together and as I spun it up, I tossed little bits of the Salmon/silver over dye into it. Perfect!! Not only did it make a beautiful yarn but it now has texture too. Since I am apparently limited in my originality right now..I see another boiled wool jacket. Possibly, a Mother/Daughter set because I’ve done about 3 pounds of it. We’ll see.

Just a quick update on my Mother. She is still loosing ground with her health but on an up note, we moved her to a Skilled Nursing Home/Rehab on Wednesday. The plan is to try and get her weight back and get her legs working again. Even though, right now, she thinks this is the beginning of the end for her, I am optimistic that this was a good choice. The place where she is has 50+ years experience in rehabilitation work with a tremendous success rate. We just have to get her head, heart and body in the right frame of mind if this is going to work..that’s the really hard part. I told her that kidding season will be underway soon and that I am depending on her to help me as she does every year..she just smiled and said the girls were going to have to get use to her not being there. That was my que to give her a big hug and come home.

Everyone have a wonderful weekend.

This is my entry for Fiber Arts Friday and updates too.