Husband and I and Moodles and MIL and Zartan all went out to the Capitol Chop House Buffet to celebrate our various and sundry Thanksgiving traditions. MIL is a vegetarian, and Husband and Zartan are meat-a-tarians, Moodles is still only working her way through semi-solid foods, and I am a dessertivore. The buffet has been our way of solving these diverse feeding patterns all at once without anyone needing to buy $29,849,484.42 worth of absurd and obscure groceries, and then spend a week in the kitchen, slaving over a hot convection toaster. Moodles ate her way through blueberries, strawberries, bananas, salmon, potatoes, stuffing, noodles, waffles, and rolls, and then succumbed to her food coma right there on the table in the restaurant.
Yesterday, Moodles and I hit JoAnn fabric for the sale on flannel and spent about 3 hours waiting in line to get our fabric cut. (When we arrived we took a number before we even started licking all the bolts we wanted to take home with us. We got number B94 and they were serving number B6...) Being as Moodles was feeling somewhat clingy, and therefore content to be pasted to my back in her backpack, we still managed to get our $5.99/yd flannel for $1.27/yd. Yay, us! Our wait would probably have been tragically long (I only brought 1 bottle, and stupidly didn't think that I'd need to change her diaper more than once while we were out...), were Moodles not Kryptonite to the willpower of Little Old Ladies. We traded line numbers like baseball cards, and Moodles and I eventually ended up getting served as number B71. Moodle's diaper did not make it. She sprang a leak, but didn't seem to care. We managed to make it all the way home without any tantrums.
We ate breakfast with Husband/Daddy, gathered up our white things for dying, and then headed over to Evil Aunti Eithni's house to soak white things in stinky water.
Moodles was NOT in a good mood, because she was having a very off-schedule kind of day, plus, she was teething. Nevertheless, she still managed to play some fun games with Auntie Eithni's stash of cool toys:
Meanwhile, we grown ups, used a whole bunch of red onion skins, and the Three Kinder Pot (tm) to dye ALL THE WHITE STUFF "goose-shit-green." And that's not just an excuse to use the word "shit" in a post. "Goose-shit-green" is a really, real medieval color, and one of my favorite colors in the whole world.
We mordanted everything in alum and cream of tartar, and then in the first batch of dying, we did about 3 yards of wool, and a onesie for Emily. (Eithni bought me Natural Dyeing
, for 12th Night, either last year, or the year before. It's awesome and full of pretty pictures and more exact recipe-type-things for what we did.) Red onion skin dye looks red in the pot. In order to get goose-shit-green, we added "Pennsic Water" to the dye pot, and the heavy iron content of the water changed our fabric, like magic, from pinkish to greenish! In the exaust bath, I did two separate balls of white roving. One we mordanted, again in alum and cream of tartar with a late addition of Pennsic Water, and the other ball we just tossed into the dye bath with Pennsic Water only.
We left the roving to soak overnight, because we had moved on to dying with madder. Also, being an exaust bath, the dye was weaker, so we wanted to give the wool maximum absorption time. Moodles was pretty much DONE by 10:00 PM, so we had to head home before the mordanted roving went into the madder exaust bath, but with any luck, I will have some pretty pink and green wool to spin soon!
UPDATE *Gross*: Moodles discovered blueberries on Thanksgiving day, and ate them by the handful at Eithni's house on Friday... This morning, I have discovered that they are just about the same color coming out as going in. Unlike carrots, which you put into the baby, orange, and they come out green. Blueberries go in blue, and they come back out blue... So now I have a goose-shit-green onesie, and a Moodle-shit-blue diaper. Go fig.
Hee hee. Dyeing adventures with Eithni. *squee*
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