Recently, you may have noticed QueerJoe blog entries have been coming out most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays…but this past Friday I was too busy.

I Don’t Know How They Do It

Local neighbor, knitter and friend Michael, has been focusing lately on quilting and dyeing cotton fabrics…in fact he’s doing a lot of pre-work for one of his dyeing workshops that seems like an insane amount of work…but he’s incredibly talented at it.

It turns out he had a lot of his mixed dyes left over from some of his exercises, so he invited me over to dye yarn the last couple of days.

Sounded like a lot of fun, so I gathered up a bunch of my natural handspun…wound it all into hanks and tied it off to prepare it for dye baths, and went to work in Michael’s workshop.

The results of my work are now hanging to dry.

One of my favorites is a fabric “blank” I made with my handspun.

I can’t wait to unknit it and reknit it to see how the colors stripe and/or pool.  I also loved a hank of Optim Merino I had from Australia which I spun up back in 2011.

Don’t get me wrong…I’ll never be a Suzanne Nelson, or I’ll never be asked to work at Indigo Dragonfly, and truth be told, I don’t think I would ever be hard working enough to want to work for either…but it was an incredibly educational and fun experiment.