Took out a lock of the fleece from the indigo bath, squeezed it all out, let it dry, rinsed it well, squeezed it again, and let it dry some more.

It’s blue! 

Soft grey blue right now.  The chemical reaction is definitely going strong (most mornings when I go to stir it, the pot has a translucent film and is greenish, not blueish, until after I stir it up again).

The only thing I’m worried about now is whether this daily agitation in the indigo water will felt my fleece!

So my usual illumination stuff for Monday nights got canceled today.  Instead, I went to go hang out with the fiber arts people, who have been having fun with raw fleece.

I thought I’d be safe, since they’ve already washed the fleece and would be dyeing tonight.

I was wrong.

I now have a vat on my back porch (ok, it’s a bucket) full of barely washed fleece, indigo, and the water that we washed the fleece in - yes, the dirty stuff.  I’m apparently to let that sit on the porch in the sun for 7-10 days, stirring daily, in order to create an organic fermentation/chemical reaction that will bind the indigo (a non water-soluble dye) into my fleece.

So I’ll have blue fleece.

Otherwise, I’ll have dingy fleece and a really smelly bright blue mess.  We’ll see what happens.  Come to think of it, right now what I have is dingy fleece and a really smelly bright blue mess.  I have blue-ish fingernails too.

I also got some uncarded wool, which - at first glance - is going to be a lot of fun.  My wool cards create small rolags (rolag = fluffy bit of carded wool in a little tube), and I’m trying to spin this at a thick DK/thin worsted weight off the rolags, spinning woollen.  This means I get about 2 drops per rolag, sitting down.  However - the hand washed, hand combed fleece really does spin a lot easier than the commercially prepared rovings, I think because it’s not so compact - the lanolin might help as well.

Also, I’m not having to spin from the fold, since the rolags are prepared for spinning woolen.

Spinning takes a lot longer when you have to card all the wool first.

So, I’m a member of the SCA. I’m sure I’ll go on and on about it at length another time, but for now, suffice it to say that the Society for Creative Anachronism is a group of people devoted to studying and reenacting life from 600-1600 AD, with a focus on Medieval/Renaissance Europe. It’s kind of like ren-faire meets civil war reenactment meets living history, with a dose of HUGE and a good healthy sprinkle of neat people.

Anyway.

So I’ve been ‘playing the game’ in the Kingdom of Ansteorra for 5 years this October - but I spent most of the first three being a better college student than SCA member. I kept up a local webpage, went to a few events, things like that. But since I graduated and got married and no longer had all this research and studying to do, I’ve had more time to devote to this particular hobby.

I participate in three major ways - as a local officer in my Barony, as a member of my local scribe’s guild, and showing up at events. Today I got to do a bit of all three - as a “reporter” collecting stuff for the baronial newsletter, as a scribe watching my first piece of original work get given out as a prize, and, well, I showed up!

And I got an award! The first award given to most people (usually) - an award of Arms, granting that I’ve been around long enough and proved not to be a total schmuck, so I can create a device/set of arms that identify me, and use the title ‘Lady’.

Not so sure I’ll be using the whole ‘Lady’ bit - I like being just Anne.

But I got a scroll!!! And my scribal teacher painted it herself - it’s *gorgeous* and even has sheep on it!

Sheep = The Loch Flock (I’m in the Barony of Loch Soilleir)
Sheep = all my knitting/spinning/fiber loving hobbies
Sheep = funny (and kind of dumb, like me)

As soon as I can find a suitable frame, it’s going up on my wall.

/baa!