Die to Dye

I love ending SOAR with a burst of colour, so if there are any dye or colour Retreat sessions, I save them for Saturday afternoon.

This is the first time I've used fiber-reactive dyes in public - I've dyed cellulose at home often enough that I've had empty dye bottles, but this was the first time in a class. 

On the one hand, there's none of the frenetic "Gotta paint this roving so it can get in the batch that's being steamed NOW" but on the other hand, there's bringing waaaay too much extra stuff to dye, and desperately trying, in the interest of not wasting dye, though of course that's moot since Kim was going to be driving the left-overs home, to get as much dye into as many rovings as possible and eventually dyeing three of four exactly the same in desperation to be done, but still, overall, I think I did a fine job.

And it's shiny!

The slightly matte, smooth roving at bottom left is cotton-silk, and I have to say that I'm very surprised at how well it turned out. The colours are not quite as vibrant as I'd hoped, but the roving, well top actually, is fabulously uncompacted with almost no snapping, unlike either of those fibers prepared alone. I've thrown away nastily compacted cotton roving that I foolishly tried to dye, and have sworn at silk, but this is really lovely. Too bad it was just a sample.

The pinkish and golden ball at the top is silk with rayon from bamboo, and it's also pretty nice, though not as fluffy as the cotton-silk (of which, by the way, I'm pretty sure I have in quantity, undyed, somewhere in the stash).

The rest, the shiny stuff, is partly tencel and partly rayon, but I couldn't tell you which is which, since I didn't tag it. 

In case you were worried, let me allay your fears: I have plenty of fiber to spin now. In fact, I had plenty even before I left for SOAR, but that's not the issue, is it?

And in a case of Too Weird to be True, exactly a week after my daughter was traumatized by gun violence, an "incendiary device" (that's what the local cops called it) went off across the street from her job at a gelato shop - though fortunately this time she was absent for the experience, though the aftermath (closing the shop since the area was evacuated so she didn't go to work) did affect her.

Truth often is, at it turns out, stranger than fiction.

And Laurie, while the popular cold remedies may well be so much snake oil, the gel-up-the-nose stuff seems to have resulted in simply a mild case of the sniffles. Not that it proves anything, but I'm just saying.