Photographic images posted to 
Designer scarves and shawls added to 
Lovely buck from summer litters that carries chocolate gene for sale.
Dyeing, Dyeing, Dyeing!
Spinning a hand carded blend of my fawn angora, moorit wool and tussah silk on my Reeves Wheel
Posted in Creating
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Hand Dyed Shetland/Mohair Roving Cold, gray days with snow falling and then melting are just not great for bunny chores. So this weekend I turned to the dyepots. This summer's shows are going to require a lot more stock than I have a present of dyed angora and roving. I'll keep the dyepots simmering for the next month or so. I'm hoping my wool spun yarns will come back soon; they are my most popular product!
Hand Dyed Chocolate Chinchilla Angora I had planned to show a step by step dyeing method here, but I packed away my formula sheets and notes somewhere and just wasn't up to digging them out. So I winged it, not a good thing to do if you want to show someone how it's done correctly. If Sandra had been able to come I would have made more of an effort. But weather forbade and I just wandered through the weekend, dumping roving and dye into pots with no real idea of the results. Things turned out pretty well. The chocolate chin above is really quite more blue than green but I couldn't get it to turn out right on my monitor. Dyeing angora is a bit tricky because it is SO hard to get angora wet through. I usually soak the fiber overnight and pick apart the clumps to get a more even color. I don't get carried away with it; I like some variation.
Hand Painted Shetland/Mohair Roving There are some excellent sites on-line that show how to paint and dye roving; I'll be putting some links under "How To" in my sidebar. I also did a step-by-step of painting yarn at my other blog last March. at the time I was using a different method of posting pictures, so it's all in individual posts rather than one. So I can't post a link directly to the dye day, but most of March last year was dyeing. I'm behind this year!
Hand Dyed Shetland/Mohair Roving I have a tendency to do too much blue and purple, so sometimes I just dump in yellows and reds to get away from blue. This gold roving turned out nice, with some subtle variations in color from rich to pale.
Hand Painted Shetland/Mohair Roving I used to lay out my roving and yarns on a table and paint them, but it was a messy business. I got clearer colors in the roving that way, though, by steaming them in my big pot on a rack. Lately I've been coiling my roving into my crock pot and painting it there. The results aren't as predictable but I like how it comes out. This is one of my screw-ups, thanks to not having my notes. I do this every year, seems like, painting yellow and blue, along with another color, pink this time, and having the roving come out in variations of green. I love this roving but it wasn't what I was thinking. I found another dye method not long ago I'll have to try and document here that should come closer to the results I wanted. Lots of dyeing and spinning ahead; the show season is fast approaching. While the dyepots were bubbling I worked on web pages. Meadows of Dan has been off-line for awhile, thanks to transfer problems with the domain name. I finally got it back and spent most of yesterday remodeling the site and making it easier to navigate and more colorful. I tried to put together a wood theme to capture the traditional mood here of the buildings and people. I still need to put in a little more navigation from page to page, but for now it's better. Last night I worked on a new purse I've started with the mohair yarn I finished spinning last week. It isn't far enough along for a picture and is taking some time to do, for some reason. It's bigger than the other purse and the yarn is slicker, so it's a little more tedious. Pretty so far, though.
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