OMG! O.O

I have to share this... I was just getting ready to finish up my Latin homework for tomorrow and checked my e-mail one last time. Sitting there waiting for me was a comment for my own blog, pertaining to this post.

In that post, I figured out the Latin exorcism rituals that they use a lot of the time in Supernatural and I attempted to translate them after completing Latin 2 last Spring. Now, I know some of the translation is wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Latin transcription I constructed is correct. Anyway, so I got this comment:

"Hi there! I'm Keith R.A. DeCandido, author of the Supernatural novel Nevermore, and I just wanted you to know that this post was IMMENSELY helpful in the writing of a particular scene in my upcoming second Supernatural novel Bone Key. Your name and blog URL are in the acknowledgments and everything.

Thanks much!"

I don't know if this guy is serious or totally bs-ing me (you never know on the internet these days), but if he is serious... I'm just... totally blown away. *squeals*

Blue Like Painted Gauls...

(I've been translating Caesar's "De Bello Gallico" for the last week...) :D

So the indigo adventures continue...

I took the pot out when I got home from class and the coppery film on the surface is less than it was, but the liquid beneath the surface is still yellowish-green, so it's still working. I'm not sure exactly what the coppery film is supposed to indicate other than it is initially ready to dye, and I have no clue if it's normal for it to go away with use.

I re-dipped the cotton that I did yesterday, to see if it would get darker. It didn't really, being pretty dark to begin with...

See, this is what it looked like dry after one dipping:


Then I did the wool pokeberry errors. One skein I had tried to overdye last week with food coloring, and another that was just messed up pokeberry. The one that I tried to overdye with food coloring turned a dark teal, and the one that was just pokeberry turned a dark, forest-like green. I was expecting maybe purple, but perhaps because the red/pink of the pokeberry is not permenent and actually washes out to a yellow-orange-brown kind of color that would explain the greens I got... I dunno. But they are a marked improvement on the nasty, uneven colors they were before.

The skein on the left is the one that was just pokeberry. The one on the right was pokeberry overdyed with food coloring...

No matter what I did with the wool, no matter how saturated it was with water before it went in and no matter how many times I tried to push it down into the dye bath, it would always come back to the top and it seemed it was quite happy to just sit there...


Then I tried one skein of white wool. And I got a pretty middle kind of blue.

These are the rest of the photos I got of the yarn I dyed today. From left to right in each photo, they are the pokeberry, the pokeberry overdyed with food coloring, the kitchen cotton, and the plain white wool:






Oh! I should note a few things about what I've learned from dyeing with indigo in the last couple of days.

1.) You have to wet the fibers first to get a more even color saturation and also to reduce the amount of oxygen that is put into the dyepot.

2.) No matter how wet the fibers are though, you're going to get some air in there.

3.) Even though pre-reduced indigo seems to ferment very quickly, if you're dyeing a lot in one day, it's still better to pull fibers out at an angle and let the dye drip out of the pot. There's a lot of waste when dyeing with indigo - at least it seems so to me - and there's not much to be done about it.

4.) For the above reason, it's better to use this dye method over grass rather than concrete, if you don't want your driveway stained until the indigo eventually washes away.

5.) Dyeing with indigo is a lot easier than a lot of the things written about it would have most people believe. You don't have to keep the pot hot. If you use the Yeast-Ammonia Fermentation Method, you don't have to use anything stronger than regular household ammonia. It's not an exact science... since I messed up calculations royally, and it still seemed to work just fine. It doesn't smell unless you stick your nose in it after the first day or so (at least my dyepot doesn't stink of yeast and ammonia anymore unless I'm sitting right next to it with my face near it). And you get such pretty colors!

I'm really happy with how it's turned out so far... But tomorrow, there will be rinsing... Stay tuned...

Yet more about the indigo...

Well, it did referment very quickly after being transfered to one of the larger stock-pots and the extra ingredients and water were added. About an hour and the copper film was thick again. This was around 4:30pm today. I took my dye spoon and gently brushed aside some of the foam and I could see that the liquid was a mostly yellow/greenish color.



So yay! I took the pot outside and carefully removed as much of the copper film as I could and introduced the cotton yarn that I wanted to try dyeing.



The instructions said to let it sit for about 20 - 30 minutes, which I did, but I think it can probably be left for a shorter time than that. By the time it was done, it was starting to get dark (blast shorter days in winter!), so the one picture that I got removing the yarn from the dyebath is too dark to really see the color, but I can tell you, it came out a kind of dark green and very quickly started turning dark blue.



I squeezed out the excess carefully with rubber-gloved hands and set the yarn aside on the grass (I didn't have anywhere to hang it). I put the copper foam back onto the top of the indigo, stirred carefully and recovered the pot with the lid. When I came back outside after taking the pot back into my craft room, the yarn was totally blue. I have it hanging to dry in the extra bathroom shower now. It's a very dark, even-looking, navy blue.



Tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to dye some wool. I'll try to do it earlier in the day if possible so the pictures will be a little better...

Okay... so here's what I did for this dyebath, in case anyone might want to try this out themselves:

4 tbsp pre-reduced indigo (you can, and probably should, use less than that... like maybe 2 tbsp to start with, but that's how much I used), mixed with 2 cups of *non-sudsing* clear ammonia. (I used a large mason jar, but you can probably do this in a dyepot if you like... you're going to need a large dyepot of at least 4-gallons.)

2 packages of yeast with roughly 2 tbsp of sugar stirred into about 1 - 2 cups of warm water (about 100 degrees). This is to activate the yeast and get it working.

After 1 or 2 hours of letting all that sit, mix the yeast with the indigo/ammonia in the dyepot and fill the pot with approximately 3.5 gallons of water, or until there is only about 1.5-2 inches of headspace at the top of the pot.

Stir gently to combine all this stuff and a copper film will probably rise to the top pretty quickly. Let it sit for a little while. Some instructions said as little as 10 minutes are needed, others said overnight. I waited a little more than an hour and it was fine.

After dyeing, if the liquid looks more blue than yellow-green, it needs to sit a while to get the oxygen out again.

Indigo update...

Well, I checked the vat about an hour ago. There's copper colored, bubbly film on the surface. I thought this very strange because that's listed as one of the signs that the vat is ready to dye things. I stuck a string of cotton in, left it for a minute and pulled it out. And indeed, it appears to have dyed it. It was green and then very quickly turned blue. I rinsed it and the cotton is now a dark blue and the color won't wash out. Very strange.

So I did some research. It seems I got "Pre-Reduced Indigo" from EarthGuild (apparently, some people also call it "Instant Indigo" and soon you'll see why). The lady on the phone had told me it's the exact same thing as natural indigo, but it isn't. It works much faster and less indigo must be used, kinda like using "Ultra Concentrated Detergent" to wash your clothes. The same size bottle will often wash twice as many full loads of laundry... So I have a problem and a blessing. Blessing first: the indigo will only take about 10 minutes from mixing the chemicals to fermentation when normally it takes a week with natural, unreduced indigo. The problem, however, is that there is far too much indigo in my vat. It will stick and cake on fibers and rub off quickly. One set of instructions for working with pre-reduced indigo says to use 1 tablespoon of indigo per 5 - 6 gallons of water, but others say as little as 1 tablespoon of pre-reduced indigo to 1.5 gallons of water. yet others say 1 1/2 tablespoons to 3 - 5 Liters of water. Obviously, it not an exact science. Still, I have 4 tablespoons in my one gallon container. You can see how this is a problem.

Lucky for me, I have two 4-gallon dye pots. Not sure if the 8 gallons, plus one gallon glass crock will be enough, but I'm going to do the calculations and try.

So obviously, I need to transfer it to the larger pots, add more sugar, yeast, ammonia and water. And then see if it ferments properly again so that the indigo isn't so great in proportion to the other ingredients. It is, according to the sources, better to have a weak solution than a strong one, because items can be dipped more than once, but once a thing is dipped, nothing but time will remove the excess indigo. So. Tomorrow, I'll do some calculations and figure out how much ammonia, yeast and sugar needs to be added, and transfer what I've got mixed up into my large dyepots and fill up the excess room in the pots with warm water. Then I'll dye my scrap cotton that I turned a nasty brown/beige by boiling it in pokeberries two years ago, see how that does and take it from there.

None of the pre-reduced indigo instructions say anything about using the Yeast-Sugar-Ammonia fermentation method, but since apparently, the only difference between this stuff and natural indigo is its concentration and how fast it reacts, I don't see why it won't work. I'm just going to have a lot of this stuff that I need to exhaust. So if anybody I know out there has anything they'd like me to attempt to dye with indigo, fully aware that it might get completely screwed up in the process and results at this point are utterly unknown, now is the time to send it my way!

Malleus Maleficarum

So... We all know that my favorite show is Supernatural on the CW, as I have oft posted of it before, right?... It's been on a cruel and drawn out hiatus since the beginning of December due to the Writers' Strike. But this next Thursday, January 31st, it's back! 9pm. CW. Set your DVRs. (LOL! I know you won't, but I still think you should at least think about it.) This week's episode is called "Malleus Maleficarum." So indeed, the Powers That Be of Supernatural love me; they made the episode title Latin.

I was just sent an e-mail with a link to a video clip from the episode. I'm too excited not to post it everywhere I can, just because. So if you'll indulge my obsessions a moment:



If you watched it, but you don't watch the show, you might not have understood what was going on there. That's okay. I just couldn't stop myself.

**dancing around my living room for joy of Supernatural**

That is all. Good night. :D

Indigo update and silliness...

Well, the vat is all set up... now it just has to sit for a few days at least... It all seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do... The indigo was weird though. I know it's not water soluble, but... knowing that and seeing what it does because it's not water soluble are two different things...

Anyhoo...

Who is Your Ideal TV Boyfriend?

Created by BuddyTV

And it only took me taking it three times to get that too... LOL! First time, I got Peter Petrelli, which would be fine, except Peter was so annoyingly clueless this season... and then I got someone from The Office and I don't even watch The Office, so I had to take it again... :D

My Indigo Vat...

I'm finally starting an indigo vat... Yay!!

I'm using the Indigo-Yeast-Ammonia Fermentation Method from EarthGuild (#3 at the bottom), which is where I got the indigo...

It gives instructions for fermenting a small amount of indigo (only one gallon of solution), which I thought was good to start with. I'm using a glass Anchor crock from Walmart (Anchor is one of my favorite glass companies - made in the USA and based in St. Pete, just across the bay from me; the company was a corporate sponsor of the school my dad worked at for 35+ years). They make a high quality, heavy glassware. I like it...

So far, I've got the yeast doing its thing in one Mason jar and the indigo and ammonia in another, both now sacrificed to the gods of dyeing. As soon as that stage is done in about an hour and a half, it's into the crock they go, where more water will be added and then it will all be left to sit and ferment...

Will keep posting about the progress...

More fiberous stuff...

Yeah, you can tell what's been on my mind lately...

I got a copy of VogueKnitting's Winter '07/'08 issue today... It has hideous sweaters on the cover. But... on the inside they have a lovely set of patterns for shawls and shawl-like things. Also, an article about how to make a Pi-shawl. It is a lovely looking thing... and I think it between the set of patterns (which have a beach theme to them) and the Pi-shawl (which has a very interesting, almost cloak-like shape to it), they have continued to help this pattern I've been thinking of in my head take shape...

I want to do a beach-y shawl... Something that is at least mostly matt, with maybe a little subtle shimmer to it here and there... maybe a linen or linen blended with silk, or... I don't know, I haven't really fallen in love with a yarn for this yet, except to say that I want to use natural fibers. I haven't decided on colors. Do I want to go with the colors of the sea and sky? Or with sand and shell? I'm leaning toward sand and shell I think... so tones of taupe, sand, off-white, light pink, and apricot maybe? Hmm... I don't know...

And there will be fringes, but I'm not sure that they'll all be at the edge, maybe some tied randomly to the body of the shawl. And I want to put sea-glass beads and shells into it somehow. See I want something deliciously beachy, that is cozy and moves in the wind and sparkles in the sunlight... Mmmm, yum!

*******

In other news, I have to say I'm completely shocked and horrified over the news of Heath Ledger's death. He was one of my favorite actors and someone I deeply admired. I'm devastated for his daughter and the rest of his family. My prayers and deepest sympathies are with them.

Results of wooliness...

Well, I only really dyed a little sample green the other day. But I over-dyed some of the pokeberry dyed yarn that turned out blotchy. I used the recipe on the back of the food color box for "raspberry." Here's what I got:



It's actually more pink than this, but you get the idea. 4 ounces of a nice saturated mauve. Raspberry. I like it. I think it needs to be a beret actually... even though I really don't like Prince and think his music kinda sucks.

There's a bit of one skein where the color is a little too light. You can actually see it in the photo, so I'm dyeing that skein a little more to see if that will fix it. That skein overall is a little lighter than the other one anyway... I hope to at least get those little places dyed dark enough so that they blend in with everything else... We'll see... Now, I would love pattern suggestions if anyone happens to know of somewhere to find a pattern for a nice monotone beret...

In the meantime, I'm getting things together to *finally* set up an indigo vat. I need something to put the stuff in. Any suggestions for a good, stable fermenting container?

*********

Addendum: The re-dyeing fixed the uneven problem with that one skein, so yay!!

Wooly things...

Been up to all sorts of little wooly things this week...

As I think I mentioned before, I want to make hats for a couple of pretty boys... Specifically, the ones on the CW's Supernatural - Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles... Who? Here are some icons that aren't mine to illustrate:

Jared as "Sam"



Jared as Jared



Jensen as "Dean"



Oddly, I have no icons of just Jensen as Jensen, so here's one more of Dean... just 'cuz...



So I spun up the samples of roving I got from Yarns Etc. There are several I think are possibilities, but I was really hoping for some more interesting blues and greens than what I got... So I'm thinking of getting something more plain and dying it with food coloring per knitty.com instructions.

I was going to use Kool Aid, but I got bit by the bug to dye something NOW this evening and couldn't go out searching for the sugar free stuff... But apparently, the food coloring is the same kind of chemical dyes that are also in Kool Aid, but in greater concentrations, cheaper and (alas) without the fruity smells to hide the vinegar. (It's okay... when I'm all done, I'll wash it with lavendar wool wash to keep away the moths and then it will smell yummy and not like vinegar.)

But I've just dyed a sample bit of my handspun green... a nice clear, bright green at that, neither yellowish nor blue-ish... in only about 20 minutes. I've taken pictures, but I can't seem to get the color to show up just right. I have a feeling that I can get the color a bit darker too, if I were more patient and let the wool soak longer, but I'm not patient... especially not for samples... it's bad of me... I know... But I think that's what I'll do for Jared's hat at least... A friend said that she thinks Jared would get a kick out of wearing a hat dyed with Kool Aid... She just thinks he's that kind of guy... And I kinda agree... But... It's still Kool-Aid though kinda... maybe?... He doesn't need to know that it isn't technically, does he? Since it's the exact same chemicals, right?... (Yeah, I'm ridiculous...)

I'm also thinking maybe of dyeing something for Jensen too now, maybe in a dark blue, or perhaps, for those who might know or care, do y'all think that the light blue-gray that I've been considering would suit him better? (see below) I'd like honest opinions on that because my zeal for trying out new craft techniques obsessively will take over if I'm not careful and my entire stash of hand-spun will be dyed before the end of the weekend if I don't watch myself. To get the right kind of dark-blue for Jensen though, I think I'll need to start with gray roving... (see the Kool-Aid dyed wool color chart - everything on the right side started as natural gray wool; see what a difference it makes?)

Even if I do dye something for Jensen as well, I'd still like to get some roving from Yarns Etc... As I said, I need something gray... I'm out of all the gray that I had, except for some that was dyed gray with God knows what and it's kinda coarse. I'll have to e-mail the lady at the store and ask if they've got any gray of which she didn't send a sample. After all, it's possible because I know I've gotten gray roving there before.

In other news: I want to make myself some of these Pedicure socks for myself. But I shall have to find another yarn of the same gauge because I'm allergic to some sort of chemical Patons uses with their wool yarn and that's the yarn the pattern calls for... It makes my hands itch, turn red and swell when I try to knit with it. Darn it... I'm thinking Rowan Pure Wool DK, which comes in some lovely colors... Hmmmm...

What I did last night...

Went to see Maya Angelou last night at the Sundome here on campus with my friend Mia. I almost didn't go because I had homework and it was ridiculously cold outside and I had no jacket, but I'm so glad I did. And I got my homework done sitting in the warm Sundome before her lecture started so it was all good. She was awesome and amazing and made me cry and laugh at the same time. Such an amazing person and phenomenal woman (I don't mean to pun her poem, she really is... there's just no other word that comes even close to covering just how glorious she is in the English language). *loves her* There will be pictures eventually. I have to get them from Mia.

She spoke some poems, some she has written and some written by others, including one of Shakespeare's sonnets. and she spoke about her love of written words and how important they are. And she said over and over and over until we laughed that she kept saying it that we all needed to go to our library to talk to our librarians because that's what they're there for and to read some poetry. Any poetry. Because she said it belongs to us and was written for us, so we should at least see what it is. And she told us about some inspiring people she's known in her life, like her grandmother and her Uncle Willy. She said we all need to appreciate and realize the rainbows in the clouds of our life and realize that we are also rainbows in the lives of other people, each and everyone of us. And I think that's so true. Amazing, amazing, amazing... If you ever get the chance to hear her speak, go! Do it!

There were so many people there that it took an *hour and twenty minutes* to get off campus and we were only parked about 1/2 mile from the edge of campus, or not even that far. So much traffic and not a campus cop in sight to direct it and people were being asshats. Very sad that. But still, there was music and talk of Maya and also our favorite tv shows and roving because I got samples yesterday from my favorite supplier, Yarns Etc. in Greensboro, and I had the samples in the car to discuss and pet, so it was all good. I'm going to be making hats in the next month or so for the actors on our favorite tv show 'cause I can and I think Vancouver is cold enough to warrent hand-spun, hand-knit hats...

Just a quickie post...

K... I'm writing this quick and then going off to bed... I get free stuff from astrology.com every year on my birthday. Things like Tarot card readings and free astrological forecast samples and stuff... Well, I just did the free astrological sample that they have available and this is what it said for me:

The Sun In The Solar Return Chart
Sun Aspects Uranus
- Uranus aspecting the Sun suggests that the individual desires to make changes, possibly in rapid succession. Generally, any solar return year that has a major Uranus-Sun aspect also has a corresponding significant life change or development such as a pregnancy or birth, career or job transfer, relocation, illness, etc. Changes tend to be more disruptive and less controllable when they involve a conjunction, square or opposition aspect, but all aspects can ultimately indicate beneficial changes. Issues involving boredom versus originality, or creativity and freedom versus restriction, are common.

Can't remember what aspect of the Sun and Uranus is in my chart. Will have to look it up on my other computer later... but as you can see, it's not far off the mark for what I'll be doing this year now that I've graduated...

Later, after sleep and my doctor's appointment later today, I will be in a better frame of mind to do the tarot reading. Right now, am far too pensive...

am home...

am home... feeling really, really awful... not sure if I'm sick or it's the travel or something worse... have had a very sensitive stomach, like as in chronic heartburn/sour stomach feelings, the last several weeks and off and on for several months... could be stress... will have to go to the doctor soon and find out for sure... oh, goodie... I hate doctors...

will update with real what fun I had for the holidays type post soon... but first - tv and sleep...