The perfect drying/dyeing month.................

I can't believe that it is Woolly Wednesday again... Another month gone, albeit a gorgeous one weather wise!  The Tour de Fleece and France is over and most of Team Blissful Woolmakers made it to the finish line and prizes were awarded!  With the weather so very hot we felt that it would be unfair to Molly to spend days in a hot caravan, so we stayed home until Fibre East.  Last year Fibre East was practically washed away by monsoon rain and people moaned, this year it was sunny and very hot and again people moaned!!!!!  I was very good and spent very little, well I was a volunteer, so not a lot of shopping time!

July was certainly a productive month - all my fleeces are now washed and I have started a fleece book, grandly named Fleece Book Volume One, in which I have a lock of washed fleece and very soon a spun sample for each fleece.  I still have to wash some BoDo which is a Bowmont/Dorset X and rather lovely. Also I have finally got my one kilo of Fawn Bond, ordered nearly a year ago, but well worth waiting for.....

I am currently sorting the locks as there is a surprising amount of colour variation from the palest fawn to quite a deep fawn almost light tan/brown - very difficult to describe - but lush!  The crimp is amazing and impossible to capture on my camera.  There is also a chocolate bond currently sitting by the door waiting for Saturday's meeting of the SpinDyeWeavers when we will split our booty!

Perhaps not the dark chocolate I pictured more milk chocolate, but again a gorgeous fleece which is going to complement the fawn!  I see some colour work on the horizon...

But more than anything else July has been a silk month.  Inspired by some gorgeous spinning and colours by LindaCC on Ravelry.  I have spun camel and silk before and loved it, but looking through my spinning book I hadn't really just spun pure silk, it was always with something rather than standing alone. Remembering that many moons ago I had experimented dyeing silk with Procion Dyes I dug out the samples and these were the results!

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I wanted more so I dyed some silk, from my stash.  There are two types of silk available to the spinner - Wild or Tussah silk and Mulberry silk and here are the first samples that I dyed, from right to left, Tussah, Mulberry and Silk Hankies

The 50 grams of Tussah Silk (orange) then became Mr Tangerine Man, 456 yards with 48 wpi.

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I loved the Mulberry silk sample so much that I dyed another batch - the skein looks like molten gold and I can see a shawl in this colour.

I found that Tussah silk takes the colour better - this I call Lavender's Blue as I took inspiration from the lavender plants in the garden

It is dry now and my fingers are itching to get spinning...................