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Woo! The circular shawl is pinned out to dry. I had the able assistance of Korah, the cat from next door, but I put her inside once we finished because she seemed inclined to nap on the fuzzy lace.
And here's proof of crocking from the indigo yarn. Just call me Bluefingers. The knitting should go very fast, though. I spun the Clun into a much heavier yarn than I usually do, and it feels weird to be working at 4.25 st/inch.
This is the chart for a silly hat using up the indigo skeins. The pattern is a shadow mosaic from Barbara Walker, although I rechart the shadow part. My brain refuses to swap dark and light on the second pass through the pattern, whereas I can make Adobe Illustrator instantly flip them.
Of course, I'm going to have seriously blue fingers doing this. The *$#@! indigo is still crocking, but it's easy to wash off my hands. So no one is likely to wear this hat unless garment-washing reduces/eliminates the crocking. Could be fun for someone with a blue rinse, though!
Looks as if we'll have rain tomorrow, so I'm also going to block the Keesmere shawl today when it warms up a little. Up until now, it's been either too rainy or too hot and humid, but today should be perfect.
Since this has been an utterly useless week in the fibrous sense - eejits at work who think their lack of planning constitutes my emergency and a dog with a nasty ear infection have blown off what I had wanted to do - I thought I'd continue the horse color gene information. These two ponies are Comer's half-brothers. Whereas Comer inherited the gray gene from their mother, they both inherited the dun gene instead. Dunheath, on the left, is a buckskin, which is what you get when the dun gene acts on a bay (brown horse with black mane and tail, for non-horsy folks). Aramore, on the right, is a seal brown (very dark bay, nearly black) with the dun gene acting on it. In Connemara circles, that's sometimes called a mouse dun. (Click on the photo for a larger image).
I was really hoping Comer would inherit the dun gene instead of the gray, particularly since she would have been Aramore's more unusual color. Of course, it's possible to inherit both, in which case, she would have looked like Aramore when young but would have turned gray anyway. Then, she would have been able to pass on the dun gene, but unfortunately, that died with their mother.
Twelve years ago today, Comer (aka Just Castlecomer to her joint breed registries) was born. The arrival of the tail end of Hurricane Bob induced labor on the very first day past technical prematurity. We had no worries about her lungs, though. She was sitting up and looking around at the world before her hind end had been delivered. Shortly after that, she got up and stayed on her feet for the next three hours, snacking at her leisure. When she was turned out the next morning, she immediately raced around the small paddock, jumping over anything in her way.
This picture was taken when she was about 14 hours old. Look closely at her squished up shoulders and hips. That's the horse equivalent of the human baby's cone head. She looks like this now.
So here are the results with freeze-dried indigo. The topmost, lighter skeins were ones I threw in the pot near the end to soak up what was still a potent dye solution. The dark skeins are still crocking after a night soaking in the washer with Orvus, plus a long soak in vinegar this morning. I may toss them into a plain water bath and boil them for a while to see if the crocking stops.
That overnight soak was not, by the way, planned. The power cut out 15 minutes after I put the skeins in, and hooking the washer up to the generator was a much lower priority than running the sump pump! Our power was out for just over 10 hours, which meant I went out every 30 to 40 minutes to run the pump. I was being really stingy with the generator, because I didn't have a lot of gasoline on hand and had the nasty feeling that we could be without power for a lot longer than we were. At 2:30 this morning, I was just about to go out to start up again when the light in the bedroom kicked on. So instead, I ran downstairs and plugged the pump back into the socket. Weird effect, though: my furnace started, even though the thermostat was not calling for heat. I just cut the power to it and haven't bothered to turn it back on. I'm just too tired to deal with repair droids today. My guess is that the brownout just prior to the outage toasted something.
Hurrying now to shut down. There are rumors of rolling blackouts this afternoon. Oh frabjous day!
I bought yet another storage bin (54 gallons), and this is it filled with only part of the last year's spinning output. Many other skeins have already been transmogrified into other items. Must Spin More..
I've finally had a chance to cruise the Fiber Arts ring, and wow, I hadn't expected so many new sites, which are also being updated. Nice!
And the dewpoint is dropping - minutely. I would be coping with it better if I had a car with A/C. Blasting it on full can at least lower your core temperature enough to help! Keep your fingers crossed that the new car will be here before I lose what's left of my sanity.
(So David, are you lurking out there?)
It's the blog's first birthday, and my mother's seventieth. Have a slice of cake all around!