day eleven: surprises

I haven’t picked up a needle all day. No regrets.

I went out to my mom’s, where my dyepots are currently living, and got to check on my buckthorn dyebath, where I’d left a small swatch of wool fabric and some natural wool roving (I think it’s Blue-Faced Leicester) in a perforated plastic bag, so it would be easier to retrieve and prevent the bark from getting caught in everything.

I was expecting a deep red-orange.

I did not get a deep red-orange.

I was understandably surprised, and looked suspiciously at the bucket.

The bucket was unmoved.

I rubbed the liquid in the bucket between my fingers, and it wasn’t really slimy anymore (it was nice and slimy last week), so I think that the pH dropped, and that’s why I got this golden yellow instead of the red-orange I was expecting. I spent the evening looking for pH strips, and ended up ordering some from Amazon. They should be here tomorrow, and then I can check the pH in the bucket on Wednesday.

Despite the fact that this isn’t the color I wanted, I’m not mad at it, just disappointed (not really). The bucket was left unattended all week, and obviously it fell into lazy and slothful ways. We shall have a stern talk, and an addition of washing soda or ammonia to raise the pH, and then we shall try again.

it really is rather a nice color.

I don’t know that I have any immediate use for this color, but it’s nice to know that I can get a nice golden yellow from the bark, when my reading indicated that you’d get that color from the leaves and green berries. Though now that I look at my notes, I see (bark), so now I need to go back to the article I was reading to see what that means. I have some leaves, and I might take a whirl with those at some point, but now is not that time.

it goes nicely with the yellow wool I wanted to dye red-orange, doesn’t it?

This is the first time that I’ve dyed anything with natural dyes (other than my thumb, and I don’t think that counts), and I’m absolutely chuffed that even if I didn’t get what I wanted, I got something that I like very much. At some point, I think I’ll probably dye some wool this color on purpose, and make something rather pretty, indeed.

Time for sleeps now. Night, y’all.