Replanting!

Oh dear! I have led you all astray! Yesterday Kristine noticed the "madder" was getting very tall. I replied and said yeah that is so weird, I thought it was like a bush instead of a stalk. Then Kristine said it looks like sunflowers. Then it dawned on me. My Madder were actually sun flowers! The Madder plants never germinated! SAD!!! I am now replanting indoors to make sure. I am also replanting some indigo. They never really got very big. I think they just damped off.

Why did I use the plexi glass over the seed tray in the first planting?
The plexi acts as a mini greenhouse allowing the moisture to stay inside, instead of evaporating. The moisture helps with germination. It helps with softening the hard seed coat. However since the plexi was lying flat it did not allow the plants to grow upright. The sunflowers germinated in days and started curving inside against the glass. So I took the glass of but lost my perfect germination environment that I would have needed for the madder and indigo to sprout. My solution was to by a dome top at the store specially designed for the seed tray. We will see if this helps.





Below is a picture of a Madder plant from the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden

Cigar Box Charkha Building and Dye Garden Update

Pictures of my current Dye Plants in the Garden


Above: Madder in the Front Yard, planted in Part Sun


Above:Indigo planted in a pot, it's in Part Sun right now, it was getting burned in Full Sun


Above: Hopi Black Dye Sunflowers in Part Sun, grown inside and transplanted outside, doing very well!

CIGAR BOX CHARKHA BUILDING!

My friend WonderMike has been making me very interested in Charkha spinning, so I decided to make my own. This didn't really start with WonderMike, really, but he is very contagious, if you know what I mean. It started at my friends house when Kathleen broke out a strange laptop machine and started spinning cotton. What the hell is that! So cool! It's so small, portable and has little wheels that turn. It was a beautiful Bosworth Book Charkha. I was instantly hooked, but my major foray into spinning had not begun. So it just stayed in my mind for a while. Then WonderMike started talking about the Charkha and showiing me a DVD how to video.

I had heard about the Cigar Box model design posted in Spin-Off. So I looked it up and downloaded the instructions. It's not like I really have time to be making this thing with my new job, taking care of the household, and animals. But I decided to print it out and see what it takes to build it.

Long story short four days later this is what my Living room carpet looked like ALL memorial day weekend. Sorry Kristine! She was a very good sport and very compelled by the process, checking in while she knit behind me on the couch as we watched Law and Order and Intervention.


Below are the wheels that I cut out of pine and then turned on my Lathe ("Julia the Jet" is her name) to make the grooves where the drive band would go. Note: before I brought out my lathe I was trying to cut the groove with a chisel, old school stylee.

Below is the close-up of most of the parts I'm using. You can see the Beading plastic cord called Magic Stretch I found at Michael's Craft Store, that I hope works.

Okay all for now must go back to work!