A small rant about pricing artisan goods

I don't like it when people tell me I under-value my own work because I price it too low. They tell me, "A handspun, hand-dyed skein of yarn for under $20? Are you crazy? You should price it much higher!"

Oh, really? Should I price it in the high 20's? In the 30's? I've seen handspun priced in the $40 and even the $60 range. I even saw handspun priced in the $200 range,for one skein, and it wasn't any type of luxury fiber.

What would you pay?

Well here's the thing. Recently on a Facebook fiber arts group I belong to, a person asked the group at what price should she list her hand-crocheted cowl in her online shop. It was a beautiful creation with stunning colors. She said that the yarn had cost her $19. People threw out suggestions like price it three times the cost of materials, or they suggested she also calculate and be paid for her time as well, others threw out numbers: $50, $60, $75. When suggestions hit $100 I stopped reading. It was indeed a very lovely and colorful cowl, but $100? Would you pay $100 for a very lovely, colorful, hand-crocheted cowl?

She ended up listing it for $103.56 CAD (Canadian dollars), and thanked everyone for their help.

Okay. Let's go back to the yarn. Let's say that I had made that yarn (which I didn't, but this is to make a point). Let's say that I had made it from 'scratch', meaning I bought a raw fleece, washed it, combed it, spun it, and dyed it all by hand. And we're talking commercial acid wool dyes here, not the natural dyes that I grow in my garden or find in the wild and make. It takes several hours to wash a fleece. It takes a few hours to comb enough fiber for just one skein of yarn. It takes several hours to spin the yarn. It takes time to pick your colors and figure out how they will be placed on the yarn. (And by the way, all of the prep - everything that occurs after the fleece has dried from being washed - is yarn design. A lot of factors are taken into consideration when designing a yarn, and all of this knowledge comes from hours and hours of work).

So I have put all of this work into what has turned out to be a beautiful, colorful yarn. Now, at what price should it be listed? Do I calculate all of my time and make sure I'm compensated for it? Would this apply to naturally-dyed skeins, too, where I have cultivated plants from seeds sprouted indoors under grow lights, then planted them outside and cared for them throughout the growing season, putting in hours of weeding, watering, harvesting, etc., and then made the dyes myself? That's a lot of hours.

Let's say I  do calculate my time, and give myself a fair wage. I'll even be conservative in my calculations. 2 hours to wash + 3 hours to comb + 4.5 hours to spin + 1.5 hours to dye = 11 hours. We can all argue over what a fair wage would be, but let's put it at minimum wage,$8.25 per hour. So my time was worth 11 hours x $8.25 per hour = $90.75.

Let's say materials (four ounces of my clean wool) cost $4. This is my cost for the fiber, plus wear and tear on equipment.

So my time plus materials = $94.75.

But I also have to figure in about 8% for all of the transaction fees I'll be paying; 8% of $94.75 is $7.26, which I will now add on to make the total = $102.01. I'll be generous and round it down to $102.

So I should list my unique, handspun, hand-dyed yarn at $102.00. Would you pay $102 for four ounces of handspun, hand-dyed yarn?

More importantly, would the maker of the lovely, colorful, hand-crocheted cowl pay $102 for my yarn so she could make more lovely, colorful, hand-crocheted  cowls?

 Let's imagine that she would. Now how much would her beautiful creation have to be priced at? Well her materials now cost $102 instead of $19, which is $83 more. Just add that to her current price and we come up with $186.56. Would you pay that much for a lovely, colorful, hand-crocheted cowl?

I'm not devaluing myself or my creations by pricing most of my handspun, hand-dyed yarns under $20. I'm living in the real world. I set my prices so that I make pretty much a set amount on each skein. It is an amount that I am happy with. I could probably set my prices a tad higher and I may in the future, but right now I like the idea of pricing my things affordably, as long as I get something out of it, too.

The reality is, I can't price yarn the way some artisans price their creations. If I did, no one would buy it. It may take just as much time, effort, knowledge and skill to make handspun, hand-dyed yarn as it does to make lots of other wonderful and beautiful things, but the bottom line is, ain't nobody gonna pay a lot for yarn.

Spinning Cotton Straight From the Boll

For Christmas my husband gave me a couple of bundles of cotton stems from a florist. How exciting! I've spun prepared cotton, but I've never had it in boll form before. I've heard that it can be spun straight from the boll and the seeds can be picked out along the way, so I gave it a try.

 

Here is one of the bundles of cotton stems with bolls, below the bundle is one boll, the seeds from the boll I spun, and the resultant two-ply from the one boll I spun up:

 

 

 

It wasn't really very tricky to spin straight from the boll. the seeds are actually quite large and fairly easy to pick out along the way as you spin. There were about six seeds in the boll that I spun. I got about one yard of two-ply from the one boll:

 

 

 

And here is a tiny swatch I knitted up with the bit I spun:

 

 

How fun! I can't wait to spin the rest up and dye it and make it into something! I also got four ounces of dyed Malabrigo roving for Christmas - wow! I love Malabrigo yarn, but I didn't know they also sold roving! Crazy wonderful! I've already spun it up and it's drying after soaking to set the twist. I got about 444 yards of two-ply fingering out of it, and of course the colors are gorgeous.

Happy Spinning!

Wet-felted slippers

At the Great Lakes Fiber Show this past summer, I bought two bags of alpaca seconds (the part of the fleece that's not first quality). They cost about $3 per bag. I wanted to use the fiber for felting because alpaca tends to felt up really nice and thick.

 

After de-hairing and washing close to six ounces, I carded it into bats. I had  about four ounces of black fiber and close to two ounces of brown fiber.

 

Initially, I wanted brown on the inside and black on the outside, but the black ended up pretty much taking over everything during the felting process, including the white wool accents I had placed around the edges of the openings and as design elements coming down off of the rims.

 

I felted around a resist (template) which I removed when the felt started to shrink and then continued felting the slippers around my feet for a custom fit.

 

Here are the slippers as they were drying over a heat vent, note how hairy they are:



 

 

Once they were dry, I shaved off the fuzzy, hairy-ness with a disposable razor. Below, the slipper on the left is still hairy, the slipper on the right has been shaved:

 

 

Below you can see both slippers, dry and shaved. I've ordered some soling material from this Etsy shop - www.shoeology.etsy.com - to put on the soles. I don't want to slip in my slippers!:

 

 

You can see how much the fiber shrinks in felting, the big white thing is the resist that I felted the fiber around at first. The slippers ended up much smaller: 



 

 

I can't wait for my soling material to get here so I can finally wear my slippers!

Naturally Dyed, Handspun Yarn

 

Inspired by a yarn featured in Rebecca Burgess' book on natural dye plants called, Harvesting Color,  I dyed up some wool with three of the more striking colors that can be had from natural dyes: steel-gray, burgundy and orange. 

 

The wool is Corriedale, some that I processed from a raw fleece I had. The washed wool was combed with wool combs before dyeing. The steel-gray is from both staghorn and smooth sumac berries; the burgundy is from pokeberries; the orange is from tickseed (bidens) flowers. My husband helped me collect the sumac berries and the pokeberries, and I collected the tickseed flowers. In the picture below, you can see the three colors on the dyed wool after drying.:

 

 

I often line up my puffs of colored wool in the order I want to spin them:

 

 

 Here is on of the three skeins of yarn I spun up from the dyed wool:

 



 

I'm making a scarf with two of the skeins. I looked through a lot of pattern ideas before I settled on a scarf. I then looked at a lot of scarf patterns before I finally decided I wanted a simple garter-stitch scarf: 

 

I'll use the remaining skein to make either a pair of fingerless gloves or a pair of fingerless mitts. I expect that the pokeberry burgundy will fade to a dusty version of itself with time. I have a skein of yarn that I dyed with pokeberries several years ago and this year is the first time I've noticed that the fading has really picked up. The first year or so it remained vibrant, after that it retained a dusty sort of version of the color, and this year it is now officially fading, although still a beautiful color. I think, although I'm not positive, that the other colors will remain vibrant longer. I guess we'll see!

Dyeing with sumac berries

 Rebecca Burgess's book, Harvesting Color, is one of my favorite dye books. Because of this book, I've added pokeberries, bidens flowers, and sumac berries to my list of favorite natural dye materials. Over the past few years, I've used pokeberries an bidens flowers to make dyes, but hadn't used sumac berries.

 

This year while flipping through her book, I noticed a beautiful yarn she made with wool dyed with these three things. It's a wonderful burgundy, orange, and dark steel-gray all spun up and plied together into a striking, colorful two-ply yarn. It has now become a quest to spin up a yarn with these colors. The orange came first, after gathering bidens flowers. The burgundy came next after gathering prodigious amounts of pokeberries. That left the steel-gray.

 

I had a few stalks of staghorn sumac berries in my store of dried dyestuffs, but I needed more. My husband and I found a nice patch of smooth sumac and helped ourselves to some of their berries. The result was that I had a nice potful of sumac berries for dye: 



 



I mordanted my fiber (Corriedale wool) with alum and cream of tarter, but to get the nice steel-gray color from the berries, you need an iron after-bath. What I did instead was use untreated well water high in iron for the dyebath, and for good measure I scrounged my husband's tool area until I found a few rusty nails and a couple of neglected tools that had rust on them and threw them in the dyepot along with the berries. I was rewarded with a beautiful witch's brew of scrumptious, dark color:

 After straining the dye, I plunked my wet, mordanted wool into the pot and let it brew for about 1 1/2 hours. Here is the fiber fresh out of the dyepot, before rinsing:

 

And here is the fiber after rinsing and drying; I love this color:

 

Here are the three colors that I'll be spinning up:

 

From left to right, combed Corriedale wool dyed with
sumac berries, pokeberries and bidens flowers

I can't wait to get spinning!

Retting Flax in an Inflatable Kiddie Pool

This year's flax crop is retting in an inflatable kiddie pool that I got on clearance this same time last year. Last year's crop retted nicely in it. The pool made it through a year of storage in the garage without sustaining any leaky holes, so here we go again!

I saved the seeds from last year's flax crop so that I wouldn't have to buy seeds this year. All sources I can find sell coated seeds - the coating contains nasty chemicals that will protect the growing flax from disease, but I'd rather not use it.

The seeds sprouted really well, but this year's crop didn't get as tall as last year's. It could be for several reasons. One big one of which was that I didn't weed as often as I should have and there was a lot of grass in there with the flax. 

At any rate, it's been pulled, dried and rippled, and is now retting. I don't think I'll get the 800 yards of spun flax that I got last year, but I'm hoping I'll get at least 500 yards. We'll see.

Dyeing with Box Elder Leaves

 

My neighbors had an enormous, beautiful box elder tree in their front yard. Recently, with heavy rains, a large limb came down. A large limb came down a year or so ago, too, onto their driveway. Unfortunately, there were several limbs that would do severe damage to their house if they came down, so today they had the whole tree taken down. They were very sad about it. With their permission, I asked the tree guys if I could gather some leaves and bark. I told my neighbor I would try to make dyes with them, dye some wool, and then make something for them with the dyed wool so that they could always remember their beautiful tree.

 

I filled my large dye pot with leaves and simmered/boiled them for an hour. For the first dip, I mordanted around 8 oz. of Corriedale wool. After straining the leaves out, I plopped the mordanted wool in and simmered for an hour. The water I used was distilled water that I purchased because my water has been funky lately (we have well water and our softener is on the fritz). Here are the leaves in the pot:



 

 

When I took the 8 oz. of wool out, it was more yellow than green, but I rinsed it in my tap water and it came out of the rinse more green than yellow. Don't know if that's because of my water or not. The dye left in the pot was much clearer and a bright, pretty yellow, so I mordanted 4 oz. more Corriedale and added it to the dye pot. After simmering for an hour, the wool was a pretty, light yellow. This time I rinsed with the distilled water and it remained the nice, light yellow.

Below you can see the fiber drying. The green on the left is the first dip, the yellow on the right is the second dip:

 

 

I mentioned several things that I could do with the dyed wool to my neighbor, such as spinning it into yarn and making something(s), like a hat or scarf or mittens, etc; or I could wet felt the fiber into a felted vessel like a decorative bowl. She said, "Oooo!," to the felted vessel idea, so that's what I'm planning on right now.

 

I still have bark. I'll let it soak for a few days before I try to make a dye with it. The only reference I've seen on the web to dyeing with box elder bark gave a tan color as a result. I'm soaking the bark in untreated well water that's really, really hard. I'm hoping the extra iron and other things will sadden the tan a bit toward a brown, if I get anything at all. We'll see what happens. If I get any color at all, I'll try to remember to take pics and post about it.

Using dried and frozen Japanese indigo leaves for dye

 

Last year at the end of the gardening season, before the first frost killed off my Japanese indigo crop, I harvested a bunch of stalks to save. I hung some to dry; I took the leaves off of some, bagged the leaves in a freezer ziplock, and stuck them in the freezer; and I took the leaves off of some, laid them out on a flat pan, put the pan in the freezer, and left them to not only freeze, but to dry out (freeze-dry).

  

About a month ago, I tried brewing up a Japanese indigo dye pot in the usual manner (like I would for fresh leaves), but I used some of the freeze-dried leaves. It didn't work out. I meant to toss all of my frozen and dried leaves but couldn't quite bring myself to do it.

 

I'm glad I didn't because I just came across the book, A Garden to Dye For, by Chris McLaughlin. In it there is a recipe for using dried Japanese indigo leaves in an ice-water preparation to dye silk. Yippee! Of course I tried it right away.

 

The recipe calls for 4 ounces of J. indigo leaves, half air-dried, half microwave-dried. These are blended up with ice-water in a blender, the mixture is strained through a cloth (like a flour sack towel) and a strainer, and then the pre-wetted silk is placed in the thick mixture for 10-20 minutes. This is supposed to yield a light, turquoise-like blue on the silk. I didn't have any microwave-dried leaves, but I used all of the dried and frozen leaves I did have on hand. They totaled about 3.5 ounces.

 

The author of the book left her silk scarf in the liquid for 40 minutes. I didn't have any scarves, but I have lots of silk hankies, so I used some of those. Although I did see the blue color on the hankies at about 10 minutes, I left them in for 40 minutes. I also tossed in a small knitted swatch of wool I had on hand. After soaking, the silk should be rinsed and left hanging to dry.

 

I rinsed my hankies, and although I caught glimpses of that pretty turquoise for a moment, what I ended up with in the end was green. I don't know if that's because I left the hankies soaking for too long, because of the chemistry of my water (well water, run through a softener), or because some of my leaves were frozen, but not dried. The color is pretty, nonetheless.

 

Here are the hankies soaking in the thick liquid:  

 

And here they are after drying overnight. The turquoise ones on top are some hankies that were dyed in an actual J. indigo dyebath last summer. The little woolen swatch is to the right of those hankies, and the green hankies from last night's experiment are below those:

 

 

 

It's a nice color, especially on shiny silk, but not the pretty turquoise I was hoping for. I've used up all of my leaves from last year now, but fear not! I have another crop growing in the dye garden as we speak. I will, of course, repeat the experiment again in hopes of attaining that wonderful turquoise in the future from dried J. indigo leaves.

A cat on a nice day

A New Map for my book, Rose of Par Kluhnd, and trying a new experience with going KDP Select

Rose of Par Kluhnd has a new map at the front of the book. The original was my own, but the new one is professionally done and looks terrific! I'm so pleased with it:

 

The map was created for me by Anna-Dawn at adawndesigns.com.

 

 It is already available in the eBook version exclusively at Amazon, and soon will be available in the print version, also available through Amazon. I'm so excited about this new map!

 

I am also trying a new thing. Thus far my books in electronic form are available pretty much through all eBook retailers, but for the next 90 days my book, Rose of Par Kuhnd: A Fairy Tale, will be available exclusively through Amazon. 

 

Amazon has a program for authors called KDP Select. In order to participate in KDP Select, your eBook must only be available through Amazon. My sales numbers have been stagnant so I've decided to give KDP Select a try. I don't like the idea of my books not being available for every type of eReader, but if no one is buying them from all of those other retailers anyway, why not give KDP Select a try?

 

So for the next 90 days, we'll see what, if anything, happens with Rose of Par Kluhnd. After being enrolled in the program for 30 days, I can do some nifty promotions through the program - discounts, etc., so that will be fun to try in about a month.

 

It'd be nice to see something happening with those sales numbers!

Processing and spinning Qiviut

 Qiviut is the warm, soft undercoat of the musk ox. It keeps the musk ox warm in its native habitat of the arctic regions in places such as Canada, Greenland, Sweden, Siberia, Norway, and Alaska. It is a rare fiber and expensive.

 

I recently purchased 1 ounce of raw qiviut fiber from the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Large Animal Research Station. You can watch how they comb the shed qiviut from their musk oxen here.

 

Below is the one ounce of raw qiviut that I bought:

 

 

The long hairs have to be pulled out by hand. They are soft, but stiffer and not as fine as the qiviut undercoat. What you want is just the wonderful, soft undercoat. Below is the same one ounce, now a bit lighter, after it's been dehaired:

 

 

I kept the hairs that I took out of the qiviut, carded them and spun them up. I got about 24 yards of yarn. It's very soft to the hand, but prickly up against the neck. Here it is with the unspun qiviut:

 

Below, I'm holding a segment of the unspun, dehaired qiviut fiber. I spun it right from these segments of the dehaired blanket without washing, carding or combing:

 



It spun up wonderfully, here is the singles on a bobbin:

 

And here is the two-ply yarn:

 

It is a wonderfully soft and light yarn with no prickles. I got approximately 84 yards, and, after washing, it weighed in at approximately 0.7 ounces. It reminds me very much of the paco-vicuna I've spun; it's got the same heavenly softness and cloud-like weight. And the same high price-tag. I used to think that qiviut was very much the same as yak, but it's not. Yak is also very soft and warm, but it's not as fine and cloud-like as qiviut. Yak is a lot more dense, but still a very nice, soft fiber, and a lot less expensive than qiviut.

I really like the qiviut, I only wish I could afford enough to make something like a sweater - we all can dream, can't we?

Processing, spinning and knitting milkweed fiber

 

The milkweed plant produces a fiber that can be used by spinners. Fibers from hemp, flax, dogbane, milkweed and nettle have been used for thousands of years to produce textiles, cordage, netting, etc.

 

I've been wanting to try my hand at getting fibers from milkweed, processing them, and spinning them. I finally had the time to give it a try, so I went to glean a few stalks from an area that I know had milkweed growing last summer.

 

I gathered around twenty or so stalks that had been sitting in situ after dying off last fall. If you gather milkweed and nettle in the early spring, after the dead stalks have been sitting out all winter, it saves you the trouble of retting.

 

The stalks have a pithy core, with the fiber and the 'bark surrounding it. At this stage, after sitting out in the elements, the stalks break easily and it's easy to dislodge the pithy core from the bark/fiber layer. There are several YouTube videos that show this process for nettles.

 

Below, you can see the core to the left, and the bark/fiber layer peeling off to the right. The fibers are shiny and white: 



 

After peeling the outer layer off of all of my stalks, I had a small pile of fibery bark:

 

So here's the problem, how to release the wonderful, white, shiny fiber from the thin layer of bark? I don't know. I'm sure there is a way. It might involve breaking it in a manner similar to breaking flax. I do have a flax break, but I wasn't sure the milkweed would stand up to the flax break. I may try that next time. What I ended up doing was carding the bark/fiber. Most of the bark is broken up and falls away, but the fiber is also broken, and not all of the bark is released. It was heart breaking to break all of that wonderful, long shiny fiber up. I will research/experiment with other methods next time.

 

So here is what the carded milkweed fiber looks like in a rolag:

 

 

I ended up with about 0.7 ounces of carded fiber from those twenty some-odd stalks:

 

 

I split that up so that I could spin two bobbins and ply them together. The spinning was challenging, it's not an easy fiber to spin in this condition, but I got it done. Here is the two-ply on the wheel:

 

 

 

I ended up with about 17 yards of sport-weight, two-ply yarn:

 

 

I washed the yarn vigorously with hot water and soap. I know that linen yarn benefits from washing in hot water, and even boiling with washing soda (which I've done with my own linen yarn). I'm sure that this would clean up and lighten up even more with such treatment, but after just a couple of vigorous washings, and letting it dry,  I wound it into a center-pull ball for knitting:

 



 Like linen, it's a bit on the stiff side, but softens up with washings, and I'm sure with wear, too.

So I ended up knitting a little swatch, about 2.5" x 4" in size:

 

I'll probably fold it over, add a crocheted edge while binding two sides together, and keep the top open to make a small pouch to hold my stitch markers.

 

 

This was an interesting process. I hope to find out how to extract the fibers without breaking them all up with carding. As it is, I think this yarn is not very strong - certainly not nearly as strong as linen. Hopefully, if I can figure out how retain a nice length on the fibers, I can make a prettier, stronger, and finer yarn from milkweed in the future.

 

Okay, here is the finished pouch:

 

 

 

It's small, but a nice size to hold stitch markers:

 



 

 

From plant to pouch took about a day and a half. Looking forward to repeating with hopefully even better results in the future.





Book Signing!

I'll be signing books at Old Trail School, nestled in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, this Saturday, March 22, from 10 AM to 1 PM. The indoor farmer's market will be in full swing, so there's plenty reason to drop by, do a little shopping, and stop at the book signing table to meet some local authors!

If you're in the area, hope to see you there!

Almost two pounds

About 1 1/2 pounds of merino, washed, dyed-to-order, and  carded into bats. Next up, grouping it for spinning, and then... Spinning! It's taken a long time to get to this point, whew!

Spinning flax into linen yarn

 

So, this past summer I grew some flax for fiber. After rippling, retting, breaking, scutching and hackling, I ended up with 6.9 ounces of fiber, ready to spin (see a picture here.) I finally had a chance to spin half of the flax fiber up into a two-ply laceweight linen yarn:

 

 

 

I got 425 yards total. The other half should yield about the same, so I should end up with between 800 and 900 yards of laceweight linen yarn.

 

I'd love to weave it into a kitchen towel, but I don't have a loom yet. I'm not sure how much knitted fabric it will make, so I'm searching patterns. I'd love to get a small apron out of it, but don't know if that's possible.

 

The yarn is a bit rough, but not as bad as 2012's crop. I'm hoping it will soften up nicely with washings and wear and do fine as an apron, if I can manage get one out of 800-900 yards.

Flower Fairy Doll

 

A couple of years ago I found a pattern in a magazine for knitted flower fairy dollies. I thought they were so cute, and then one of my nieces became pregnant - with a girl! I searched and searched for my magazine and couldn't find it, but then found the back issue in my library, hooray! I photocopied the pattern (since I'd already bought the magazine, but lost it, I figured it's okay to photocopy it).

 

I made the little doll, but she sat without hair, face, or wings for months. I finally put hair on, and then a few weeks later, the face. Over the weekend I got serious, with Christmas coming, and gave her wings and her little flower purse. Now she's waiting to be wrapped up and sent off in a brown paper package all tied up with strings (figuratively speaking, really just taped up with the address written in Sharpie).

 

Here she is sitting on her little flower purse: 

 

 

 

Closing the petals:

 

 

Tucked inside:

 

 

And here is a view of her hair:

 

 

 

She's made out of all handspun, except for her hair - I used mostly scraps of some colorful Malabrigo yarn I had on hand, and a few snippets of handspun as well. The handspun is all hand-dyed, some of it with natural dyes.

 

I got to use up bits of stash yarn on this project. The pattern is a Susan B. Anderson design and I found it in Knit Simple Magazine Holiday 2011. You can find the pattern online here.

Now to finish wrapping things so I can send this off!

I have a new wheel!

 

An acquaintance had a friend who was ill and asked her to find a good home for her spinning wheel after she passed. My acquaintance tried to find historical societies, schools, or arts and crafts places that might like the wheel, to no avail. The she found out that I'm a spinner, and, voila, I have a new wheel! It will certainly have a good home here, and if I decide I don't need it, I know lots of people who would love to give it a good home after me.

 

My original wheel is on the left, a Kromski Fantasia, which I love. My new wheel is on the right:

 

 

It's a Lendrum single treadle folding wheel. I've already spun a small skein on it. My daughter says that now I can teach her to spin since we have two wheels - she claims that I hog my original one and never have a chance to teach her, lol! (she's right)

Excited to get the hang of my new wheel!

This year's flax crop, all processed and ready to spin.



 

This year I grew about twice the flax that I grew last year. It was a good year and the flax grew well, it seemed a bit taller than last year's crop. After pulling, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling, I've got about 7.2 ounces of flax to spin. that's a lot better than last year's 1.4 ounces (you can read about last year's experiment in growing flax for fiber here).

 

Here's what I have to show for this year's effort:

 

 

 

The little blue bit is a small amount that I tossed into one of my Japanese indigo dye pots. It was only in there for about 10 minutes. I wanted to get a sense of how the flax would take up the indigo dye.

 

I did a much better job of retting this year, and the flax turned out much nicer and much softer than last year's small crop. There's still room for improvement, but I'm excited about spinning this up over the winter.

 

And I ended up getting about 8 ounces of seeds  for next year's crop. That's what I planted last spring, 8 ounces. I'm happy that I don't have to buy my seeds again. The seeds I had been getting were pre-treated with things to help protect against certain flax diseases. I wasn't too happy about that, but couldn't find any other sources that weren't also pre-treated. But now I have clean seed from this year's crop. Hopefully it'll be enough to keep the flax plot going.

On my wheel now

Getting purple with Hopi Black Sunflower seeds

EDIT: Please read to the end to see results and colors, I've included the not-so-successful results of this dye session, and added results of other experimental methods. 

If you're having trouble getting purple from your Hopi Black Sunflower seeds, you're not alone. I've had a hard time getting purple from the Hopi Black Sunflower seeds I grew this summer. You can see my previous post here. So far I've gotten a very pretty dark teal and various grays. I was becoming frustrated, so I began to do some research.

First I tried searching for books in my library that might have information on Hopi methods of dyeing. I came up with nothing there, so I turned to the Internet. I searched for Hopi methods of dyeing and came up with a couple of sources. One is a book called "Hopi Dyes," and the other is a book which combines that book with another and is called "Navajo and Hopi dyes," compiled by Bill Rieske.

My library sources didn't have it, so I looked for it on Amazon. I found a copy for just over $3, and with shipping it came to just over $7. Of course I ordered it:

 

I was wondering what types of mordants the Hopis used and this book tells of a couple, one of which is a naturally occurring, low-grade form of alum which leaches out of the desert floor and can be found in chunks. And the recipe for the sunflower seed dye called for this - hooray! I substituted my own alum and used considerably less than what it calls for in the recipe, since I suspect it's higher grade.

 

In my previous attempts, I had been mordanting my fiber before putting it into the dye pot. I was mordanting it with alum and cream of tartar. The recipe in the book has you put the mordant directly into the dyepot. I nixed the cream of tartar and used only alum.

 

The dye acted exactly the way the book said it would. Here's a brief summary of what I did, but I recommend you get the book, it's a treasury of information:

 

I brought my seeds slowly to a boil and boiled them gently for about 20 minutes. The book says no more than 30 minutes, or until the seeds split. You will get a deep maroon liquid:

 

The color of the drippings at this point, after soaking into a napkin, were a teal-ish gray:

 

After straining out the seeds, I added the alum - 1 1/2 tablespoons (I was originally going to dye about 6 ounces of fiber, but ended up dyeing only about 4 ounces).

 

The dye liquid turned a deep, royal purple after adding the alum:

 

 

 

You can see the difference in the color left by the drippings on the napkin after the alum was added, it is a pronounced purple next to the gray pre-mordant drippings:

 

The recipe calls for you to slowly bring the pot to a gentle boil again and gently boil for about 30 minutes, then take the pot off of the fire and leave the fiber soaking in the pot for 24 hours.

In my failed dyes, the fiber turned to either the teal or the gray pretty quickly. The yarn with this dyepot has remained purple and is now soaking until tomorrow:

 

The notes at the end of the recipe say that for wool, the color is not wash-fast, and on cotton, the color is not light-fast and will fade to blue with time.

 

I happened to dye about 2 ounces of bleached white yak, and about 2 ounces of white baby alpaca. I'll add some pictures tomorrow after rinsing.

RESULTS:

 

Okay, it's been several days and I'm just now getting around to posting pictures of the results. I did NOT get purple with this method. I let the yarns soak overnight, and the next day, they were gray. The two skeins from this batch of dye are the two right-most skeins in the picture below. The light gray is what used to be white baby alpaca, and the dark gray is what used to be bleached-white yak.

 

I repeated this same method the next day with one more skein of bleached-white yak, but this time let it stay in the dye pot for only about 15 minutes. I took it out and it began to turn gray almost right away. Within about 15 or 20 minutes it was gray as well. This skein is the left-most of the three skeins pictured together in the picture below. It is a medium gray compared to the other two.  

So, pictured above are the range of colors I've gotten with the Hopi Black Sunflower seeds, shown on the various fibers I've dyed with it. From left to right:

Washed Bluefaced Leicester/Dorset cross fleece with a small, combed sample of the dyed fiber, which turned gray. The fiber was mordanted in alum and cream of tartar before going into the prepared dye pot.

Superwash merino/Tencel roving, mordanted in alum and cream of tartar before dyeing. It came out a beautiful dark teal-gray.

Washed BFL/Dorset cross fleece with a small combed sample of the dyed fiber. I mordanted this sample with vinegar, and added vinegar to the dye pot, too. It came out a sort of grape purple.

Skein of bleached-white yak, dyed with the method outlined above, but removed from the pot after about 20 minutes. The nice lavender purple color turned gray right away.

Skein of bleached-white yak, dyed as outlined above. In the morning, the color was this dark gray.

Skein of natural-white baby alpaca, dyed as outlined above. In the morning, the color was this light gray.

Washed Border Leicester fleece with a small combed sample of the dyed fiber. I let this fiber soak in a warm pot of left-over alum and cream of tartar mordant water that had been used to mordant yarn for a different dye project. I added a bit of vinegar to this water before putting the fiber in. I then followed the method to prepare the seed dye outlined above, but I also added some vinegar to the dye pot after adding the alum. I then dyed the fiber for about 20 minutes. I took it out and rinsed it with the left-over mordant water before a final water rinse. It came out a slightly gray-looking lavender purple.


Below is a picture of that dark teal-gray color on that SW merino/Tencel roving. It's sort of hard to capture in a picture, but it's really pretty. I can't wait to spin this up - I'm hoping the spun yarn turns out as wonderful:

And here is a curious thing, also hard to capture with my iPhone photography skills - the medium-gray skein of yak was tied with yak except in one place where one of the ties was missing. I replaced that tie with a scrap of (sheep's) wool I had lying around. That tie actually came out lavender (maybe lavender-gray). You can sort of see it in the picture below:

 

 

I still have more seeds to experiment with. If I get any really wonderful results, I'll post about them, too. If anyone out there has any suggestions, or has successfully gotten purple with their Hopi Black Sunflower seeds, please let me know!