Success and Not so Much

Occasionally the things you do can only be called an unqualified success.  Other things not so much.  Our super success this week is Jazz.  Peggy's pony has been poked and prodded, blocked and medicated, treated and observed for the last four weeks since he managed to nearly put his eye out.  Yesterday was his last day of getting various gooey stuff squirted into his eye.  He took it like a champ although we did need to leave his halter on the entire time.  By about the second day he figured out he would rather not have me treating his eye and would wander off as I approached him.  He is a smart pony after all.  But regardless of how he felt about the procedure, he needed to be treated so I needed to be able to grab him without chasing him all over the pasture with a rope.   Here he is this morning finally without his halter...

If it looks like he scraped off all the hair on his eyelid and across the side of his face that's only because he scraped off all the hair on his eyelid and across the side of his face.  The scabs are all gone now and I'm sure the hair will grow back.

Another success this week is the last batch of cotton and cotton blend yarn.  We ran out of salt so this final batch didn't get dyed on Sunday with everything else.  I used two dyes - Light Khaki and Green.  Interestingly, all I ended up with is green but it's a green I really like.  As is so common when it comes to dyeing, it's not the color I expected but I like it.

I really like the way the different yarns take the dye differently.  The cotton/rayon blends tend to dye more evenly which is fine although not really our goal.  The 100% organic cotton on the left shows the most variation in color saturation.

In the "not so successful" category is my dyeing super wash Merino wool with purple basil.  We grew purple basil a few years back and when we used it in the middle of the summer we got a stunning grass green.  Green is not all that easy to get with natural dyes - usually is requires getting a yellow from onion skins or goldenrod or one of the other common yellow dyes and then over-dyeing with indigo to get green.  The green we got from purple basil that summer was a wonderful rich green.  I have been picking the purple basil and drying it all summer along with the marigolds.  I dyed with both the dried purple basil and with the fresh plants to see how they compared.  The dried plant material gave a nice beige.

The fresh plant material gave a much more green color but not nearly anything you would call a saturated grass green.

I'm not sure what I will do with all the dried purple basil.  It does give color its not what you could call stunning or remarkable or wonderful.  Beige is a very useful color, just not usually the star.