Tag Archives: yarn

You know that worried feeling you get after you’ve worked terribly hard and long at something– the feeling that it might not be worth it?

I’d been dreaming of a crop of Hopi Black Dye Sunflowers ever since last summer, when a good friend (hi, Susan Sam!) sent me a copy of A Dyers Garden. After looking at woad, then at weld, considering coreopsis and wondering if indigo really is as magic as they say, I decided, last winter, that we’d at least grow some sunflowers along the side of the house.

I spent hours working on that bed this spring. I worked in compost, collected and spread wood ashes to sweeten the soil, and logged lots of time on my hands and knees, weeding out quackgrass and prickly nightshade. I thought, as I worked, This had better be worth it.

After planting the meager packet of seeds, there came the work of worrying about the seedlings. In order to keep all your hard work from being a waste, you have to work all the more– and the thing, I guess, about caring for living things is that it can call be undone in an instant, and there is no coming back. Since the Virginia spring is a nightmare rollercoaster bit unpredictable, we rolled out the plastic sheeting for the sunflowers on more than a few nights. And I can’t tell you how many times I came to Zac, distraught: “Nobody watered the sunflowers today and I think they’re all dead!”, and, primarily, “The horrible geese have just transected every single plant and now they’re all dead!”

Nature laughed and the sunflowers bloomed anyway.

Every time I saw them, I thought, This was absolutely worth it.

It’s been about a month since their peak, and so the weekend before last I went out and cut off all their heads, so that we could harvest the seeds for dyeing. Zac mordanted a small batch of yarn, prepared the dye bath, and amazed us all:

With natural dyes, the main colors you can easily get are yellows and browns– brilliant and colorfast reds, blues, and purples are notoriously difficult to obtain. The entire wealth of Phoenicia, for goodness sake, was built on purple (it has a fascinating history, color. If you’re interested, this book has captivated more than one of our farmstay guests– I highly recommend it). To get a purple this rich from a flower that you grew in the yard is quite something.

If you’d like to get your hands on this super-limited edition of yarn, you can do that right here.

I’m so happy and proud to be able to share this yarn with you all. Just in case you were wondering: Worth it, 100%.