DYEING TIME

We have been busy skeining up the new yarn and I have been itching to see how it would dye, so Sunday I gathered up 10 skeins of wool and went to work.
The first thing is to wash the skeins, as they have the milling oils on them and the dye will not be successful if the oil is left in.

 After the washing I put two skeins to dry in the natural color.

 I went to work with the dye, I use Cushing Acid dyes.
 With the weight of the skeins recorded in my dying diary, I decided to use the full amount of dye and on this batch of blue I got my calculations a little wrong and put extra dye in.
It is not the look I wanted, but I love the color and I don't think it would have come out as nice on pure white wool.

 Now the green, the brain is still not in gear and I use the same amount of dye as before only this green is very pale so it has not over powered the color of the yarn as much as the blue and  I can see some of the heather look that I was after.







Now I realize what I have been doing and drop the amount of dye to the right amount for the weight of wool the Rose color has come out very well and it is showing some of the heather color I want to see, but it still isn't quite what I was looking for.

Last batch and I decided to use the amount of dye that I would use on the plain white sports 2ply Romney and this is the look I was after you can still see the color of the original wool coming through the dye making that lovely heather color.
I can see that I have a little more experimenting to do but I think I am nearly there.
I now hope everyone will like it, these first skiens will be going up on the website soon.

New Yarn

I am so excited, I have got my first batch of colored Romney yarn yesterday. I only have a few colored romneys and I have had to save the wool from a couple of shearing's. I sent the wash wool to the mill in July, I was hoping to have it back in November, but the mill had a few problems. I have done my first skeins, I am very pleased with it, now I want to dye some of it and see how it knits.
Keep you posted as I do the dying and knitting and when it will be available on the website.

Busy weekend

We have had a very busy weekend, the Wisconsin weather has co operated and we have managed to get half way down the fence line cleared, 400ft. I am so pleased, but I think we will both need the rest of the week for our aching bodies to recover.

Window of opportunity

Hi and happy new year, sorry it has been a while since I blogged but his is the quite time for the ewes they are all hopefully pregnant and I have only had one health issue and that was with Spot one of the Rambouillet's last Saturday as I was filling the water butts I noticed that she had a mark on her butt that I had not seen before and the weekend before we had trimmed them out ready for lambing ( that means trimming away all the long wool from around there butts and back legs). I got Dave to help me catch her ( not hard she is one of the more friendliest ewes) and I found she had a large abscess, we cleaned it up gave her an antibiotic shot and I am pleased to report that she is doing well.
WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
Today with the nice weather in Wisconsin (NO SNOW) Dave took the day of work so we could do some work on our 18 acre field, we need to clean out our fence lines so we can put in new fencing for the sheep. We don't want to take away all the tree's etc as this will take away the shade the ewes need in the summer but we do have to make a path through for the fence and take away any unwanted under growth like briers and low limbs on trees.

The first two pics are before we started and the one above is as we finished, you can see Dave at the end where the fence line will go. We didn't get as far as we wanted as we had a problem with the chain saw, Dave swooped the gas for the oil and the oil for the gas and chain saws don't run well on oil. Ha! well the day ended well the chain saw is up and running and tomorrow is another good day in Wisconsin.