quick update

... Am busy taking advantage of naptime to work on some Secret Christmas Projects around here. It's not bad, except that with Jamie asleep, the cats start vying for affection, so in order to properly work on the SCP, I have to first evict and move cats. It's mostly Spoot and Mab who get in the way. Romeo and Angus like to nap near Jamie.
This is the vile black walnut bath I cooked up several weeks ago, but totally failed to post about.
Basically, I peeled the hulls from a bunch of black walnuts, nearly a 5-gallon bucket full. I covered them with hot water and soaked them for a couple days (admittedly, because I got busy and sort of forgot what was going on.)
When the Fool started asking why the kitchen smelled like compost, even though he had emptied the pail and the garbage and cleaned the fridge and looked for scary things in the sink trap .... I moved on to the next step.
I poured the black walnut mess into an old enameled kettle and boiled it for a while.

Then I strained it back into the bucket and added three skeins of KnitPicks Wool of the Andes and two skeins of their undyed tweedy sock yarn with little colored flecks.

Here's how it came out - a nice dark brown.

Comments

=Tamar said…
Very nice. Did you only use the hulls or did you use the whole walnut? (I've read that they're not bad to eat but you have to crack them by driving the car over them on a concrete driveway...)
meg said…
I only used the hulls. we plan to crack and eat the walnuts, but like so many things, we haven't gotten around to that yet.
Benita said…
Very nice indeed! I love dyeing with walnuts and I love the brown you got from yours.
JustApril said…
COOL! I can understand why you are putting off cracking those things, tho, they aren't easy. At least the ones we go from out tree back in the day were much more shell than nut - but worth the trouble in the end.

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