News

  • Cleaning House

    Periodically I get the bug to go through all my stash.  I have a large enough stash that I rarely remember what I have so churning it occasionally ...
  • T-shirts and yarn and fiber too!

    Peggy and I spent all day Saturday wearing gloves and sloppy wet shoes and having a blast with color.  Yes, it was a great dye day.  We started off tying t-shirts and linen place mats and ladies hankies into odd shapes with rubber bands and string, then squirted them all over with lots of color and tossed them in a plastic garbage bag to sit overnight.  Letting them sit overnight was the hard part.  Tie dying is such fun.  Don't over think it - just squirt and enjoy.  And we got great colors!

  • Natural Dye Workshop

    We have been talking about having a natural dye workshop for quite a while.  I love the natural dyes although Peggy is happier with the acid and fiber reactive dyes.  It's great that we cover all the bases between us.  The Tall Pines Spinning & Weaving Guild, located in North Houston, asked us to put on the natural dye workshop for their members this spring.   I had told Gloria Chuckman, president of Tall Pines, that I thought 10 would be our maximum number of attendees.  We ended up having five, plus Peggy and I, and that turned out to be the perfect number.  Any more people and we might have been falling over each other.

  • Fiber Dyeing

    We dye a lot of yarn and really enjoy it.  It's easy and fun.  Indigo and other natural dyes, acid dyes, fiber reactive dyes, hand painting, vat dyeing - it's all fun and easy.  It's also exhausting since I'm not as young as I used to be and we usually do marathon days when we set up a dye day.  We mostly do a dump method.  We start with a color, say blue, and then add whatever strikes our fancy..... purple, green, pink, whatever.... until we have a color we like.  It means we always get wonderful colors we love but can never reproduce them.  We do have a couple of "recipes" for hand painted color combinations we really like, but only a couple.