Wednesday, November 12, 2008

A day at the office

No..., I did not go and get myself re-employed at a real job.  I've kind of had a second (or third) one all along.  It's just I don't talk about it much.  But I still have to put in some days at the home office for this one...like Monday.

Husband and daughter out the door by 7 a.m. - check
Kitchen cleaned and dishes washed to empty the sink - check
Dye materials ready - check
Animals fed and what not for a few hours peace - check
Dance music CD's prepped and ready - check
Large glass of Diet Pepsi, chilled - check

Ready, set, go!

Seven hours later (with a lunch break to the feed store) - 

There's 19...in case anybody's counting.

9 comments:

Nancy K. said...

You didn't just dye all those up this morning!!!

DID you?????

How pretty!

Kara said...

So pretty!!! What type of dyes do you use? It looks like you dyed the yarn rather than roving. What method do you use? I am just beginning to play around with dyes, but have only tried Kool-Aid and with roving so far.

melanie said...

No, that was all day Monday. It was a new personal record for me...for one day's production.

melanie said...

Kara-
We use acid dyes from Dharma. We currently dye fingering and sport weight yarns using a variety of methods - vat, hand-painting, and dipping depending on what the colorway calls for.

In the photo you can see HP House yarns like Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, (on the bottom of the pile) which are self-striping and use the dipping method. Also you can see an unwrapped skein of Eastern Stripe on the right which requires both dipping and hand-painting so as not to blur the colors.

No dyeing of roving - yet. Not until I learn to spin better!

PumaViking said...

not a bad day's work! :)

Unknown said...

Just a few concerns....I am up at 4:45 am, are you? If not I think you should so you can be even more productive and so you can think of me:) Are you handwashing or using a dishwasher? I have more respect for handwashers like myself:) Dancing????? I need more explanation. But my biggest concern is the Diet Pepsi....your killing me on 2 levels; 1st the diet stuff & 2nd Pepsi is nasty...Coke is the drink of choice. But with all that said I am very jealous of your beautiful colors!!!!! So what would be a good number of turkeys to start out with?

melanie said...

Well Kristi, can I promise to think of you at 5:30 a.m. and call it even? That's plenty early enough for me.

I handwash - even had the dishwasher removed when we moved in here!

Dance music of the right era (Black Box, Madonna, C&C Music Factory etc.) is very motivating. Anything slower, and I start to sign along and my productivity on this type of project goes WAY down...

Hence the Diet Pepsi...Diet because if I drank this much of the full calorie stuff, I'd be as big as a house. And Pepsi, because, well Coke was my college drink. And for some reason, the caffeine in Diet Coke gives me headaches...

We started with 4 turkeys, and that is how many we intend to over winter this year again. Just have to make sure the adult males have separate housing or enough range room so that they don't fight. When young, they hang out in a pretty tight flock and seem to establish a working pecking order like chickens.

Jen C said...

Melanie,

I think it was just a month ago or so that I made the connection that you were responsible for dying a sock yarn that I was gifted. What a wonderful job to have!

Love the pile of colors, too.

Take care,
Jen

melanie said...

Jen-

How cool is that! I like to hear that people enjoy our yarn, because I have so much fun dyeing it and knitting with it myself...