day eighteen: pH-unbalanced

No sewing today — a couple of the fingers on my dominant hand are numb (I think I slept wrong) and I needed to put the shirt in time-out for a few hours.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t work on the project, though! I went to the store and got some ammonia to add to the buckthorn bath.

I brought it up from the shed to the garage so that I’d have access to water and light, and added a gallon or so of water, since I know a lot had evaporated. I stirred that about with mah stirrin’ stick (one of the buckthorn sticks I stripped for the bark), and tested the pH again. Once again, it was pretty neutral.

Then I started adding ammonia. I’d have used washing soda, but for some reason the store I went to didn’t have any, and I knew that ammonia would do the job, albeit somewhat stinkier.

this is what the pH of straight ammonia looks like — about 11 or 12

left: Mr I.M. Dry, pHNeutral, Bournemouth. right: Mr. Al Kaline, pHhigh, Barking, Essex.

I started out adding the ammonia glug by glug (an obscure yet HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC unit of measure), but that was getting me nowhere. In the interest of not using all 200 pH strips in the first evening, I added about a quart of ammonia, and voila and eureka! The pH changed.

This is the result of dumping a quart of ammonia in the bucket.

So yeah… only took maybe half an hour, but hopefully it will extract everything and next week I’ll drop some goodness in it.

Night, y’all.