Mushrooms and Rust, Oh My!

After the weeks of rain we had here in Mt. Airy, we had loads of moss and a great variety of mushrooms growing all over the place - these are just a few that I decided to gather and wrap in some silk gauze to see what would happen. Well it is now sitting the same rusty water outside in a brass pot alongside some softly colored silk with bright red rose petals wrapped inside (from my 49th wedding anniversary bouquet from my sweetheart) .

Here are the packages before they are soaked - the white has the mushrooms inside. Poor things are being quite tortured out in the rain, sun and goodness knows what else. I can't wait to "disrobe" them this weekend! I'll be sure to take pictures of the results!

Blackberries, Copper and Rust

Well this was a very interesting experiment; I wanted to do more rust dyeing so I did some reading and found a very interesting article on-line (sorry, don't remember where as I read so much) anyway, I found that if you mix vinegar and salt and add some copper (in my case copper tubing) that any other metal you add after the copper has been sitting in the mix such as screws, paperclips, etc., will turn copper; something to do with the copper ions transferring.

This piece of silk began pink from the blackberry dyeing a few weeks back; the color was just okay nothing exiting - so I soaked it in vinegar, wrapped up some keys and pennies that had been treated in the copper/vinegar mix inside, tied it up and put it in the rusty water for a week or so covering it all with plastic.

I'm just amazed at how gorgeous this is - the pictures do not do it justice at all and capture only small sections of the interesting designs. I am considering listing it on Etsy after I have my fill of gazing at it for a while!

A Whole Lot of Knitting Going On

I made this for Meg's, our 14-year-old granddaughter -- it is a sweater made from machine knitted swatches and samples, serged together with a little crochet and embroidery added.

Meg could be a model and when she tried it on, it fit her perfectly and she looked adorable - but did I get a picture -- NO!!! I'm so annoyed at myself; I was worried that it may not fit because I didn't have a pattern for her size but I guess I remembered from my last "hug."

I knitted several "artsy" scarves on my knitting machine and forgot to take pictures. One was a lovely deep red and I dropped some stitches to allow me to weave a feathery art yarn through the holes for a Birthday gift and another with fabulous curls running through it (A Noro soft mix of greys and seafoam with matching curls that had touches of shrimp; my fav - and it is now in SC).