Saturday, February 05, 2011

Routines and Dyeing


8:45 am
                I really am a creature of habit. Generally it is good, since it means I can get up and not think very much but still get through the early morning stuff that I want to do – start the fire,  take my psillium and vitamins, start the oat bran cereal cooking, do my stretches. I do find that my back feels much better if I do those stretches religiously, so I do. And now it is nice to do Morning Pages. But life is intervening. Life as in Work. I was afraid of this. I just don’t have time to do all that, plus get dressed, gather lunch, DO THE BUNNIES (in caps because it is a rather major ordeal these days) and get to the bus in time. So the MP’s have suffered. It is too bad. AND there is the aerobics I’ve been doing. It was great during JTerm, but that is hardly “reality.” Now I need to get the 9 am bus to get there in time for lecture at 10, so unless I can get the 8:05 bus instead, I cannot do the running before lecture. There are 2 hours 11-1 between lecture and lab, and that might work eventually, but at first it is important to get things ready, and myself ready, not to mention eating lunch. On Thurs I had a bunch of stuff to do and I think I ended up eating lunch quickly and I was miserable all afternoon during lab. It felt like gas cramps, but I think it was more like a kind of blockage and I think was from eating too fast, and eating too many of those cookies I made loaded with coarse oatmeal! It made lab not at all fun, at least for me. Anyway, I will probably end up doing the running after lab, meaning I get home really late (after 6), meaning the buns get done really late, and supper gets done really late. Oh well. Yesterday I drove, which should have made everything easier, but I also had to stop at the farm for the winter vegetable share, and then at Atkins market for a few things. Once everything was finally done, I crashed into bed at 9:30.
                What boring drivel this all is! I have a lovely day today all to myself. But not so lovely since I MUST finish financial stuff. Boring. Before I stretched I sat here at the computer drinking my psillium etc and reading emails and then I started in on the bag of potato chips that was sitting here. Oh dear. Not a good idea! And totally apropos of nothing, I am only writing it because now my stomach hurts and so it is on my mind!
                I’ve been trying to dye with onion skins. I’ve saving the skins for a long time. A few weeks ago I started boiling them in a pot on the wood stove. It worked out very nicely and the liquid was a very nice rich golden color. But I had no mordanted wool to use. So the pot sat. And sat. and got moldy – really moldy! I finally scraped the mold off, and I set up a pot with wool and alum. I had a full 10 oz of wool and not much onion “juice” so I decided to boil more skins, only this time I used a different pot – one of the enamel ones I usually use for dyeing. But a lot of the enamel has worn off so first I scrubbed out the rust, then I let them boil. Not such a great color this time – kind of dark and murky. I added the wool anyway and it is a kind of nasty khaki green color. Oh well. I assume it was from the metal in the pot reacting somehow. I guess I’ll try again with the first pot for the onions, and try to find a more intact pot for the mordanting and final dyeing.
                Today it would be very nice to try to get in some spinning. I finished the pink stuff. Now I can start in on the lovely orange sherbet stuff I carded this fall.


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