It's Been a While.....

I feel like I'm getting back in the swing of things and at last have some things to report.

A bit more dyeing, with an 'e', for a start. This time a 12 step colour wheel covering the basic colours. As per Elizabeth barton's instructions the dyes are all mixed....

.....and cloth has been torn and labelled........

......the first session yielded this delicious result......like a handful of lollipops.......

The best results came from the scraps of silk organza - how I wish I had an excuse to dye metres of it........

The pale Arashi Shibori from the previous dyeing session was overdyed with pure dye solution and produced a much darker shade.......and looks quite dramatic - if I do say so myself.

 Back with more news soon,

Sue xxxx

Good Ideas

Some ideas prove to be quite good, for example........

.......these seemed to hit the spot with a family lunch on Sunday.......

On the other hand, this might be debateable. Coming home from our fishing trip we passed trees on the roadside loaded (or should that be 'laden'?) with crabapples. As it's now 2 years since we (I) made crabapple jelly we thought it was time to make some more. (The first batch was eaten and gifted very quickly.....)

So, ten minutes later we had this......

I'm not quite sure what possessed us to pick two bags full - particularly as we said we wouldn't take many......was it because they were free or maybe a safety net in case the fruit was damaged or riddled with insects - but no, it was in excellent condition.....We weren't positive they were true crabapples - but they were certainly inedible raw....

Yesterday the process began with weighing and washing the fruit, .....

Cutting it up roughly - fairly quick as it was in good condition -

...and cooking it down. 

Then into a bag to drain overnight......

.....and today continued with adding the sugar (and sugar and sugar) to the juice and boiling it up til it jelled.

Til finally we (I) ended up with this........

Looks right, tastes right, but I still have one bag full of crabapples and several tubs of applesauce in the freezer....and I'm not sure I have the stamina to process anymore because when we arrived home I found these in the mail......

.......and lessons one and two for this class in my email inbox.......

So it's time to get out of the kitchen for a while because as I'm sure you can appreciate I'm very keen (dying even) to get back to dyeing (with an 'e', as always) and trying my hand at designing with the fabrics created......

Til next time,

Sue xxxx