Pokeberry Dye Process

One of my projects from last winter were my 18th Century Women's Mitts, according to the pattern by Mara Riley. (The pattern is excellent by the way.)

I have been asked about what my procedure was, so here it is. As best as I can remember, because while I keep meaning to take notes about my dye experiments, I keep forgetting. Thus, my measurements are very, very approximate. (More of an art than a science?) One of these years I'll have the time to sit down for some proper experimentation, and I'll record my recipes. (I'll try and make these directions fairly idiot-proof, so don't mind me if I state the obvious, please...heh.)

NOTE: I'll try and get better pictures tomorrow once the sun comes up.

Stage 1:
Pick the berries by simply cutting the racemes (fruit stalks) and dropping them into your container. For this, I used a 2-quart applesauce jar (it was what I had available) filled it, mashed the berries down, packed in more racemes on top of the already mashed berries, and mashed those down. (The amount of berries becomes important later.) If I remember rightly, the jar was something like 1/2-2/3rds full once I'd mashed up the berries again. Obviously, you want to try and break open all the berries.

Stage 2:
Fill the jar to approx 2/3rds full with white vinegar. The ratio of vinegar to berries is actually pretty important. I've dyed with pokeberries a total of three times (though the first time was more than 10 years ago so I don't really remember what my Mom and I did.) Most recently, I once added a lot of vinegar to comparatively few berries (I had a gallon jar, so put in more vinegar) and the second time used a smaller ratio of vinegar to berries. You see the first case on the left (red skein), second case on the right. (The lighting in both my old dorm room and my old apartment was terrible, but the colors are moderately accurate here. Enough to sort of illustrate the point, anyway. The first is more of a brick red, the second more bluish.)

My other hypothesis about why this may have happened: the dyebath itself may be light sensitive enough to affect the final color. (The ages-ago project turned out the bluish color the most recent did.) The first dyebath was kept in a windowless basement, almost entirely in the dark, and the third was essentially kept in the dark as well, since for all intents and purposes I lived in a cave last year - my apartment was almost completely devoid of any natural light. The second bath, on the other hand, was kept in a bright lab with large windows...well, something else to test.


Stage 3:
I essentially forgot about the jar of dyestuff for about three months, or didn't have the time to use it. Finally, I strained it into my dyepot, added enough water to be able to float my yarn, and heated it for somewhere about 30 minutes. This is one part where you have to be careful - whatever you do, don't let the dye boil! This will also brown the dye. I neurotically watch a candy thermometer I've put in the pot, and make sure the temperature doesn't go above 80C.

Stage 4:
Added the wool - prewetted, one skein of fingering weight Bare Peruvian Highland Wool from Knitpicks, pre-mordanted with alum. (It was all I had, and all I needed for my mitts, so I can't tell you anything about the strength of the dyebath.) This is what the wool looked like when I couldn't help fiddling with it:
I let the yarn simmer for about an hour. Then pulled it out, rinsed it, let it dry, and knitted it up. I have worn the mitts out a couple of times to events, so I intend to pull them out and see how much they may have faded.

And that's it!

Knit-therapy

This may sound odd, but my Muir has become my sanity project. Lace knitting seems like an unlikely candidate for knit-therapy for someone with attention span issues, but actually, the fact that I have to concentrate so hard on not messing up to the point of counting stitches aloud as I'm knitting means that I don't have the extra brainspace to dwell on other, more unpleasant things.

So I get the lift of accomplishing something at the same time that melancholy is forced out of my thoughts. Perfect.

Here's the product so far:It's going a lot slower than cabling or regular knitting of course, but I'm rather proud of my progress.

First Lace

It's exciting to start a project that's something completely new. My first ever serious lace project is Muir (somehow the Pomatomus socks don't really feel like real lace for some reason. Maybe because they're not all floaty like this is.)


And I'm back on track after missing two rows of the pattern. Luckily one of the missing rows had beads in it so I noticed and only had to knit back four or five rows. Mohair is awful to take apart. Even just knitting backwards instead of actually ripping (which would never have worked) was a complete pain and took forever...

If you keep a thing for seven years...

...you'll find a use for it.

I've finally figured out what to do with the giant box (formerly containing the crappiest pollen samples ever) that my boss at the museum let me take home!

Make a very large Chakra Wheel (warning, pdf.) Cigar box? Ha!

Now I no longer feel dumb for taking that thing home. It should be cool, because I could make the wheel ratios so that the spindle has a super high rotational speed. So I should be able to create a wheel appropriate to spinning super, super fine thread.

I think that maybe I could even make different sizes of the smaller wheel to make the wheel more versatile, which would really be good, as the box is so huge.

I'm going to practice on a smaller one first...

August Knitting

August was a productive time for knitting, as I swore off sewing for at least a month after struggling to finish (ha, yeah right) my brother's trousers in time for the 4th of July. It's not really worth working on something if you don't enjoy it.

At this rate, it'll probably end up being the end of the month before I pick up my sewing again, and then I think the first thing I'll do is finally finish my stays, once and for all. But in the mean time...

Fetching - yes, me and 4 million others. The yarn was supposed to go into a pair of the Twisted Maiden Mitts, but that pattern is ridiculously problematic where the outcome is really something very simple. (There are errata posted, but there's a lot more wrong with that pattern than some missing thumb increases, let me tell you. They're sized to only fit a child with adult-length arms, for one. There's probably several sections of ribbing missing. It was bizarre.) It just wasn't worth the effort of re-writing the thing when all I wanted was something quick, simple, and stress-free. So thus the fetching, in the discontinued Mulled Wine colorway of Wool of the Andes.

Yep! I finally finished my green sweater. (Pictures taken by the incomparable Betty.) My mom called it the 'wooly green monster' when I was nearing the end, as once you get to the raglan decreases and all the parts are fused, it really tends to look like a dog's breakfast. The sweater's Mariah from Winter Knitty 2004. I like this sweater so much that Durrow's gone into the project waitlist, to be made for my brother, who's pre-approved the pattern ("that's so cool!") and picked out a yarn. 

Also finished a pair of Pomatomus from Winter Knitty 2005 with one of three colors of sock yarn I recently acquired. I hadn't knitted any socks in a very long time, so it was fun. Got almost all of the second sock done on a vines field trip to Northern Michigan.

The pictures I have of these are from a whacky angle. I may bother and try to take new ones somehow...

Then again, maybe not. Either way, it was a very fun pattern, though I have to admit that the first sock has some mistakes in it, that just weren't noticeable enough for me to want to pull it all out. I did have to rip back slightly when I barely ran out yarn for the toe of the first sock, but the socks still fit, so it's fine!

Now I've finally got my Muir going, too.

Wow, I make a lot of things out of Knitty...