You know you're onto something, when...

It has taken about a month but with my +T3/-T4 experiment well underway I'm finally back to my project work.  Hurray! And oh, what a project this is proving to be: book, workbook(s), web site(s) and workshops. Everything I wrote this morning gave me another five items for my 'to do' list. The good news is, this is fun; okay, my idea of fun. And to have the brain engaged at long last as well as the motivation and energy to do the work--I'm positively dancing with glee.

Once I've had a run to the grocery store and a cup of tea afterwards, it's back to the desk(s) (laptop desk and desk-desk) to continue my progress today. Yowza, get outta her way!

Dyefest 2008...the first

Since the 60's or 70's I have been interested in natural dye materials and the beautiful colours they produce on wool and silk. My experience until now has been with onion skins (of which I have plenty as I usually go through 35 to 50 pounds of onions in a winter). Over the summer friend Pia and I bought a box of more exotic dye materials I'd only previously read about, never worked with. Our treasure box included alkanet, cochineal, tumeric, indigo solution, cutch, and logwood, plus a quantity of mordant chemicals. We were like kids in a a very big candy store.

Pia and her husband Soren set up a terrific dye workshop in the bottom of the barn. We had two gas rings, one was a turkey deep fryer in a previous life and I think the other was perhaps a sauna heater. There were four dye pots of various sizes to work with, at least a dozen plastic buckets; water from a long hose meant we didn't have to haul water to the barn from elsewhere. Given the number of dye pots we ran over the course of the event, a count I place at 16 give or take a few and not counting soaking baths or mordanting baths. My count is based partly on the amount of yarn and fibre I brought home and partly on memory of the number of cochineal, logwood and alkanet baths we had trying to exhaust the dye. Pia still has several buckets of usable dye liquor to work with, but we were exhausted and had to end the festivities so we could get back to the rest of our responsiblities and lives. Oh, but it was so much fun!

I now have the house festooned with brightly coloured skeins and fibre, while I wait none too patiently for it all to dry. Today anything that is still damp can go outdoors to finish drying, and I suppose I should get the dyepots out of the car and into the garage for storage. Though really I hate the thought of putting them away. I have so many more ideas of things to try, but as I now don't have any skeins left to dye, I have my work cut out for me this winter to get a lot of spinning done for the May 09 dyefest. Then again I could 'cheat' and order in a quantity of undyed yarn?

Perhaps now that my initial excitement has been worked through I can actually plan projects to dye as Pia did. All I wanted this time was colour, any colour, because it was all so exhilarating.

I do have 8 x 113 gm skeins of worsted weight merino dyed in the brightest cochineal we got (a vest perhaps?); 6 x 50 gm skeins of mohair for a shawl in another version of cochineal that was more purpleish and one skein of Polwar

th sock yarn dyed a soft lavender from the alkanet bath. I also dunked my Polwarth shawl into the purpleish cochineal bath and it is a lovely colour now.

So, there I sat in the lawn chair I had the sense to bring, crunching up alkanet roots into small flakes.  Then I ground the cochineal bugs to a fine powder in a blender for two different approaches, the bright and the purpleish.  Both were soaked overnight in jars to bring out the most colour possible from this rather expensive material ($45 for 225 gms of bugs!). Our entire treasure box, clearly, was a fabulous gift at $50 split between us.

The learning curve for this neophyte natural dyer was big, very big. I don't think I could have had more fun and I'm sure I haven't since my dear friend Kate Waterhouse (1899-1995) introduced me to natural dyeing from local plants (on the prairies) in the early 70's. The sense of wonder and magic she shared has stayed with me. I remember coming into her house and poking my nose into pots simmering on the stove, never sure whether it was a dyepot or dinner! We read then about things like cochineal and indigo but these materials were completely out of reach to us and we could only dream over the pictures or descriptions we read. I know that Kate was with me in gleeful spirit during the dye

fest and I thought often of how much she would have loved this experience.
Pia and I, once we had a dyepot ready and filled with fibre or yarn, would take turns poking it with tongs just to glory in the colour and watch it take-up into the fibre. I think we spent the entire time with great big silly grins on our faces. I don't think fun and delight gets any

better than that. 

And here's the help...aren't they lovely?

Beginning a Journey

For a number of years I have been living with a hypothyroid condition, as well as the jolly Addison's that manifested in 2001. Is there a relationship between years of untreated hypothyroidism and collapsed adrenals? All too likely it seems.

I have been taking Synthroid for the hypothyroid situation for a decade, but never really felt well, better definitely than before medication, but not what you'd call either energetic or happy. I have little enthusiasm except for knitting which requires very little movement or thinking. My approach has been if that's all I could do, at least I'd do it very well. And so I have.

But, what of energy, enthusiasm, clear, focused thinking and sustained work? Dream on girl--that seemed long out of reach and the best I could do was accept the situation and make the best of that too. Resignation has become my middle name (I don't actually have a middle name so I can use whatever I like as the situation warrants). When faced with something I believe cannot be changed, I do what every relatively sane person does--try to live with it and get on with whatever is left. After the Addison's diagnosis my world became significantly smaller as I learned to accept massive weight gain (50 to 60 pounds) and much less energy without any capacity for sustained work or movement (such as gardening or beach walking).

Recently help and encouragement from friend Pia has given me new hope in an area where I believed nothing whatever could be done. Synthroid you see is only one of 4 thyroid hormone components of a healthy thyroid. In the 70's the T4 hormone was isolated, synthesized and became the accepted treatment for hypothroidism. Thinking was that as long as we had T4 in our systems enough T3 would be converted in the body to provide the essential amount of that.  Before the 70's everyone with hypothyroidism was treated with desiccated thyroid from pigs and this contained T1, T2, T3 and T4. Enter the miracle of chemistry which believes that one component could stand in for the lot and if those of us taking T4 alone didn't feel well, continued to gain weight, have trouble concentrating, focusing, getting out of brain fog or being capable or motivated for any sort of physical activity, well--that was our personal moral failing and nothing to do with treatment protocol. 

Resources for thyroid information include The Thyroid Solution by Ridha Arem and this website.

I am now on the second day of a very low, introductory dose of T3. I cannot truly believe how I feel and don't yet trust it (why would I, given my history?). I feel awake. I want to move, I can focus my thoughts, I'm not lethargic, uncaring, or dull.  Who is that I wonder? And what can she do with her life now?

Today, the answer is, not that much. The weather is rotten with the remnants of tropical storm Hanna saturating the air and giving periods of deluge besides. There is little light, it feels like dusk, that's how dark it is. But it's the weather--not how I feel--that limits what I do with this day. Wind and driven rain, and my newly delivered firewood, uncovered as yet, is getting a thorough soaking. Damnation.

Hey, if my eyes are that open, I could give that microscopic silk another go--assuming I can actually sit still long enough! Actually I want to see about finishing a vest I began last winter which would be perfect as the weather cools into autumn. I only have a bit of the collar and trim left to do, but in worry that I'd not have enough yarn I put it aside. I've recently had a new idea to deal with not enough dyed handspun yarn so now I have the confidence to finish it.

Knitting with paper clips?

I have a quantity of very fine silk. Think fine sewing thread. The last use for this silk (oh, so many years ago) was in an 8 harness silk satin that I wove 55 inches wide at 90 threads to the warp inch and about 60 to the weft inch. The fabric was beyond glorious but of course without a market for this elegant stuff I had to cut it up and then painted on it; for a few years I sold it as small paintings until a gallery owner told me that nobody cared what I painted on. Sigh.

So I have had a few dozen of these massive cones of silk waiting for a project or two worthy of them. In my current knitting follies I am attempting to knit lace with this yarn. I'm knitting on needles about the diameter of paper clips, 1.75 mm, working on a sample from Sharon Miller's book, Heirloom Knitting. To say this is a challenge would be significant understatement; maybe not on the order of threading a loom at 90 threads to the inch, but challenge enough even so. I made a mistake on the first attempted yarn over and dropped a stitch so now must go in quest of a very very fine crochet hook to resolve that issue--if I can. Yes, thanks, I already know how nuts this is, no need to share that with me, I'll take it as given, shall I?

Will I ever make anything beyond a lace sampler? No idea. I have a serious stubborn streak where fibre challenges are concerned and a pathetic desire for bragging rights in this area as well.  So I may well persevere in spite of all the clear indications of folly, at least until my eyesight gives up.

On needles of much more sensible diameters (4 mm; 5.5 mm and 6 mm) I'm making excellent progress on the Rhinebeck sweater, the lama/mohair jacket and a mohair version of the Hemlock Ring Blanket; so perhaps the silk lace idea is comic relief?