Today began relatively early, even for me. I woke up around 5:08 am when a Small Furry Thing informed me that it was breakfast time. I rolled over and went back to sleep, and woke up again around 5:12 am with the same Small Furry Thing rubbing her head against my hands and explaining how much she loved and adored me, and how much more she would love and adore me if I got up RIGHT NOW to feed her breakfast. I grunted, rolled over, and tried to go back to sleep. Have you ever tried to sleep through a small-but-insistent cat kneading your neck, purring in your ear, rubbing her head against anything you left sticking out from under the covers, and meowing as if her life depended on being fed breakfast IMMEDIATELY?
I should have known better. The cat always wins.
After I fed her breakfast, I started putting yesterday’s dyed sample skeins into strips of posterboard, which is where I store them until Ginny has a chance to wind them. That took about twenty minutes, and resulted in this lovely jumble:
You’re looking at 110 mini-skeins of dyed yarn, all done with acid dyes (mostly Sabraset but also some Washfast Acid dyes). I have 22 more in the dyebath now, plus another 77 (4 batches) that will be done over the next several days. And that, unbelievably, is IT! for the Sabraset samples. There will be a total of 495 samples when I’m done, covering every possible two-way mix of my base colors.
(For the record, my palette is: Sabraset Sun Yellow, Mustard, Scarlet, Deep Red, Royal Blue, Turquoise, Violet, Washfast Acid Magenta, Washfast Acid Golden Yellow, and Polar Red (not a Sabraset dye). )
It turns out that Washfast Acid Golden Yellow is redundant (it’s almost exactly the same shade as 90% Sun Yellow plus 10% Deep Red), and Polar Red and Washfast Magenta are nearly equivalent, so I will probably eliminate Golden Yellow from my palette of “mixing” colors, and select one of Polar Red or Washfast Magenta after doing some light and washfastness tests.
Anyway, after I finished organizing the samples, it was almost dawn, so I went out and set up another round of dye samples. Then I came back in, and started in on the day in earnest. Beamed on about half the blue/gold warp, took two hours of tapestry lessons, went shopping for some miscellaneous stuff with Mike, put together a small tapestry frame loom, dyed 66 mini-skeins for the Never-Ending Dye Samples, and went out for a one-hour bike ride. Then came home and ate some wonderful shrimp tempura and sweet potato fries that Mike made in our new deep-fryer.
And now, off to bed! A Small Furry Thing will no doubt want her breakfast again tomorrow.
No doubt. They always do. Our two small furry things (well, actually, one Medium and one Large) don’t play together at all, except at 5AM. Then it’s “crash! bang! let’s knock the bathroom wastebasket against the wall! let’s crumple all the bathroom rugs into crazy heaps for people to trip over!” Luckily I can usually sleep through it, or at least ignore them and get back to dreamland.