sweetgeorgia

Adventures with Bugs

Thank you so much for all your lovely comments about the shawl! It is so satisfying to complete something finally! I’m trying to use the momentum from knitting the shawl to finish my handspun Lotus Blossom Shawl…

Sunday’s post with the mystery photo was, yes, cochineal bugs. I took the opportunity while the DH was away in Ottawa to wash some smelly fleece and dye with bugs…

Cochineal is a scale insect that feeds on a kind of cacti in Mexico and South America. The red pigment is from carminic acid which the insect produces to repel its predators. Maiwa sells whole cochineal bugs which need to be ground up before using. At about $9 an ounce, it’s expensive stuff… compared to say, $2 an ounce for madder.

I was gifted a “Magic Bullet” food processor from my father-in-law who bought one and got one free… He seemed less than enthusiastic when I said it would be perfect for grinding up bugs for dyeing. I should learn to keep my thoughts to myself sometimes! But it is fantastic for grinding the bugs to powder in seconds.

Maiwa’s instructions recommend 4 to 8% WOF (per weight of fibre) of cochineal. Since it’s so expensive, I opted to go with 4% — so about 17.5 g for the pound or so of Gotland I was dyeing. Oh, here’s the raw Gotland fleece:

I basically weighed a big chunk of raw fleece, washed it with Dawn and let it dry so that I could weigh it again afterwards and figure out what I would be left with*. In this case, I lost about 20% of weight after washing the fleece — that’s all dirt and grease! I was left with just over a pound of fleece that went into this dyepot. It was mordanted with both alum and cream of tartar because I wanted a real fuschia red/pink colour. Without the cream of tartar, I think the dye ends up a warmer red.

The powdered cochineal was boiled up with a touch of vinegar and some water for about 15 minutes and decanted. I repeated this two more times, so there were in total three decantings of the cochineal. I saved the powder that was left in the pot for a future dye session (maybe mixing it with logwood or lac?). The decanted dye solution was returned to the pot and I added the mordanted fleece:

The fleece dyed slightly unevenly with the tips, of course, being a lot darker than the rest. Since I know the yield (80% of raw fleece) for this fleece, I’m not planning on washing and drying anymore of it. I’ll wash it, mordant it right away and then drop it in the dye pot. The extra drying and wetting times just increases the handling of the fleece and increases the chance that it will felt or get all messed up.

Even with just 4% dye, the dye pot wasn’t even close to exhausting, so in mild panic, I dropped in some other skeins of yarn in an attempt to exhaust the pot. There was a handful of silk noil, some corriedale wool roving and two skeins of stuff I had handpainted…

None of this extra yarn or fibre was mordanted, but still took on a lot of colour. The lime green portions of the skein turned into a really interesting green-gold colour — not really something you could easily mix from synthetic dye powders… it just seems like a whole other layer of colour. Very very interesting.

I’m using this skein as warp in my next weaving project. And even after adding these extra fibres to the pot, the pot still didn’t exhaust. So not wanting to be wasteful, I kept the rest of the stock for next time!

* My bad: Yesterday I termed this “degreased wool per raw wool” as “shrinkage” — but shrinkage is loss of yardage. If anybody knows the proper term for this (yield?), let me know please!

Wicked

Isn’t it wonderful how you can be wicked tired, barely able to drive down Highway 1 without falling asleep, and then perk right up just talking about dyeing. Then actual dyeing causes you to go hyperactive… But who wouldn’t be all excited about this:

Last night in spinning/dyeing class we dyed up some raw Romney — I dropped in about 3/4 tsp of CIBA dye powder and the pot didn’t exhaust. There was about 12 oz of raw fleece and we calculated the dye powder at 1 tsp per pound — I guess we were so excited about putting colour on wool, we forgot a couple things: raw fleece is heavier than clean fleece (hence too much dye powder) and greasy fleece resists the dye (hence too much dye powder). But here it is — a wicked indigo, moody blues kind of colour — washed in Dawn and dried, kind of teased, and ready for carding. I think we are making boucle with this next week.

Wicked Carding

In other whoa technology kind of news, take a look at what a bunch of local girls have done to their Pat Green Beverly carder… How smart is that?! Maybe I should have called these girls before I went and bought my drum carder!

Life before drum carder.

But lest you think it was just the shoes that pushed me over the edge and got me drum carder crazy, here’s what really made me crazy:

I blended some hand dyed Merino with plain white French Angora and a bit of hand dyed Angelina (might be Blue Moon Spinnery?) by hand using some coarse Ashford hand cards. It really wasn’t much fun — do I have too much merino? too much angora? Is it even? This would be so much easier with a drum carder?

The Angora guard hairs really pop out and give it a spiky look. I don’t mind — I think it looks kind of interesting, but it may not be so interesting if you want to knit it and wear it around your sensitive neck.

The skein was washed, whacked (for some fulling) and all chopped up into 5-yard samples. And the samples, well, they are travelling the world now in the KR Handspun Yarn Swap.

Junky Love

How about some Thursday morning yum? Here you go:

This is some of the thrums, scraps, bits & bobs, and leftovers that I’ve collected for nearly a year. Every time I get a bit of junky leftover fibre that I don’t want to try to incorporate into my spinning, I set it aside in a little strawberry container. The container was getting pretty full, so last week when our class drum carder was available, I carded the whole shebang into this little batt. I should do this more often.

Where Carders Come From

Yesterday morning, we took our little mini-road trip to Chilliwack, stopping only for coffee and doughnuts at Tim’s (because that’s what Canadians do on road trips). The drive was easy and we enjoyed the amazing sunny weather that is unusual for Vancouver in February.

Patrick and Paula win the prize for most adorable couple, ever. Paula showed us parts of her massive garden (raised beds for asparagus) and even gave us a couple homegrown apples. They helped unpack my new drum carder, plug it in and show us how to use, maintain and repair it. Since we came to pick up the carder, they included a few additional toys (I mean, tools) — a flicker and a double-sided “side flicker”. Patrick was happy to show us the other equipment that they are working on, including the Supercard and Triple Pickers — Richard was so impressed with the workmanship that he even said on the drive home that my next drum carder (whenever that might be) can be a Supercard — remember, you are all witnesses now!

So this is what I got, a Patrick Green 3-speed Powered Fancicard:

And here are the bits and pieces that accompanied the carder:

Of course, I started playing with it as soon as we got it home — I blended some green Border Leicester and blue Coopworth into…

So. Much. Fun.