Strawberry Blonde

A few weeks ago, Mabel and Ambrose picked some strawberry blonde marigolds to make a dyebath. At the time, I was dyeing scarf samples and Ambrose wanted to dye one with his marigolds. I was not prepared to do that, nor was he, though of course he didn’t understand that it wasn’t as simple as dropping a scarf in the dyebath (two step mordant process, etc.) I remembered some yarn I had stashed away and knew it would be fun for Mabel and Ambrose to help dye their own skeins. I also thought that would be easier for some reason. (In hindsight, I realize that scarves actually would have been easier-but anyway…yarn was more fun.)

I started preparing the yarn, and instructed them to pick more marigolds, because those initial tiny pots of dye would not be sufficient. Over the course of a few days we dyed two skeins with our marigolds resulting in lemony yellow skeins. To keep the fun going I used some saxon blue dye to turn Ambrose’s skein a soft green, and Mabel’s a deeper shade of turquoise. Of course, it didn’t stop there. Next, I received knitting instructions. Ambrose wanted a hat and fingerless gloves, and Mabel requested the same. I’m not sure I can squeeze all that out of these two skeins. Well, I know I can’t. But so far, Ambrose has a hat. If Mabel will settle on a pattern, I will get started on her hat soon. For Ambrose’s hat, I didn’t follow a pattern. Just a basic hat with a rapid decrease and a pompom! I think all hats this year will be getting pompoms.

I’ll have to show you the hat I knit for Beatrix next. It’s totally unrelated to this post and these marigold dyed skeins of yarn, but it does have a pompom!

p.s. I have started to slowly stock my shop with my traditional fall soaps. There is only one batch of lavender spruce this year and cedar woods will be stocked soon!