The Fuzz was having none of that.  A few seconds after we opened the cat carrier, he got up and walked out of the cat carrier.  He made a beeline for the litter box, peed in the litter box, and then walked over to the food dish, where he stuffed his  face for awhile before going off to explore the rest of the house, to make sure that no Evil Other Cats had invaded in the interim.  Now he’s jumped up onto the bed and is curled comfortably up in his favorite spot, resting.

I think he’s going to be Just Fine.  :-)

What a happy ending!

Lanaset dye samples

The Lanaset (acid dye) samples were dyed in the microwave in a vinegar-water-dye dyebath, then removed and boiled in soapy water to remove the (often substantial) stains from the cotton.  (I used Dawn dishwashing detergent as the soap.)  The Royal Blue swatch (top left) was not boiled but soaked in warm soapy water for several hours, which seemed to work just as well (and is probably easier on the alpaca).

The Lanaset dye samples, as you can see, turned out very well for cross-dyeing.  They “took” on the alpaca weft (all samples are turned so the warp runs top to bottom and weft from left to right) but not on the cotton.

The fiber-reactive dyes were another story.  These samples (Cibacron F and Pro MX) were all soaked in soda ash, a small amount of dye added and squished thoroughly through the sample, then placed in plastic bags in a plastic container, and “batched” in a 180-degree oven for about 2 hours.  They were then rinsed thoroughly, washed in hot soapy water, and some swatches were actually boiled in soapy water to see if the color would come out of the weft yarn.  In many cases the weft yarn was dyed (against expectations!) even in an alkaline environment

Here are the fiber-reactive samples:

Cibacron F dye samples

Procion MX dye samples

As you can see, in many cases the fiber-reactive dye dyed both equally, and I’m pretty sure the dye is permanent, since it didn’t come out even after boiling in soapy water.  The colors that seemed to “take” least are the Cibacron F Fuchsia, the Procion MX Cobalt Blue, the Cibacron F Turquoise, and Procion MX Turquoise.  All the yellows seemed to “take”, which is a pity because it means I don’t have an effective yellow in the fiber-reactive range.

(The Cibacron F Fuchsia might have been a labeling mistake, since it appears that it didn’t “take” on the cotton.  I’m suspecting it of being a duplicate of the acid dye Polar Red, though I have no idea how that could have happened!  I will have to re-run the experiment.)

It’s possible that heating the fiber made the alpaca “take” the dye better, so I’m going to run another batch of fiber-reactive experiments, this time batching at room temperature.  I’m hoping that works better!

I’m also going to run another batch of tests using a wool weft, to see if that makes a difference.

On the slate for today: weave more samples, pick up and adore The Fuzz.

Tomorrow I have the day off, so I am going to spray down the weeds in the front yard.  A landscaping company is dropping off 7 cubic yards of compost, and the plan is to apply Roundup to kill the extremely tenacious weeds in the front yard (we dug one out and the tap root was two feet long!), then cover in compost and seed a new lawn with a mix of clover and tall fescue.  The clover will help fix nitrogen, feed the lawn, and look pretty.  The big question is whether to dig in the compost, which will be great for the soil but will take a lot of time and muscle, or whether to leave it on the surface and let worms dig it in for us over time.  I’m kind of inclined to dig it in, if only to give me something to do at the house while Mike is wiring up the electrical circuits.  I need more exercise anyway!

Friday will be the CNCH Fashion Show, and I’m in it.  I have the day off, and am going up there in the morning to drop off my entries.  Then I’m volunteering for two hours, and then I’ll have a few hours to check out the galleries and the marketplace.  John Marshall and Giovanna Imperia will be there, and I definitely want to check out their wares!  And then, of course, is the Fashion Show.  I’ll be modeling Kodachrome and Autumn Splendor.

Meanwhile, I have been at work in the dyepots.  I wove up about two feet of cloth – twelve inches in 2/2 twill and twelve inches in 8-shaft block twills – and dyed a bunch of samples with them.  The results were interesting!  The acid dyes, as expected, had little effect on the cotton – though I did have to wash them in really really hot water with soap to get the dye stains out of the cotton.  (Soaking for several hours in soapy water seems to have done it, too.)  However, the fiber-reactive dyes with soda ash were quite variable – some only lightly stained the alpaca and some dyed the alpaca to the same intensity as the cotton!  This explains some of the variable results I got earlier.  I’ll take photos tomorrow.

But for tonight, I’ll just be happy that The Fuzz is improving.  We visited him in the hospital twice today, and he was noticeably better both times.  I hope to have him back with us soon.

That said, he’s had a good run, and a good life – very few cats make it to twenty, and he is nearly twenty-one! – so perhaps it’s just his time.  But I am devoutly hoping not.  As I said, we love him dearly and were hoping to celebrate his twenty-first birthday with him in about a month.

At the moment, the vet thinks it’s simple dehydration, brought on by a cold, and they’re rehydrating him via IV.  He did eat something yesterday evening and nibbled a bit today, but he’s still lethargic.  So if you know any kitty gods, say a prayer for him, OK?

Meanwhile, I have been burning off my stress by weaving and gardening.  I have transplanted my precious violets (I love them and have fond childhood memories of them, but they are rare around here, probably because they’re tricky to grow in our climate) and set up an irrigation system for them and for the lemon tree.  I also fertilized the lemon tree, which it probably hasn’t had in ages, and Mike broke up the concrete slab that was smothering the roots:

broken-up concrete slab

(I’m super impressed: we didn’t rent a jackhammer, Mike just broke it up with a sledgehammer!  Lots of raw muscle involved.  Woot!)

And I finished warping the loom, and wove about 30″ worth of sample:

twill blocks sample

The warp is 10/2 cotton, the weft is Henry’s Attic Alpaca Lace.  I’m pleased with this sample, as it shows I guessed the sett correctly: 30 epi for twill, using a weft that’s slightly thinner than the warp.  The squares are square and the cloth looks quite nice.  I plan to use this to illustrate the tradeoffs in design: the bolder the woven pattern, the simpler the dyed shapes should be.

But first I need to confirm that these yarns will dye correctly.  I had a major surprise once where a wool yarn, which was not supposed to dye with fiber-reactive dyes and soda ash, did take the dye – rendering it useless for cross-dyeing.  So before I weave 16 yards of fabric using these two yarns, I’m going to dye a sample.  I will probably do that tonight, assuming The Fuzz is doing well.

Meanwhile, in weaving-land, I have finished threading the 10/2 cotton warp and am halfway through sleying the reed.  Threading was a snap!  It turns out that 10/2 cotton is much faster to thread than 60/2 silk, probably because it’s easier to identify and separate the individual threads.  I was threading up at only 8 seconds a thread!  (Usually it’s more like 10-12.)  With only 300 threads that’s only 2400 seconds, or about 40 minutes to thread the entire scarf.  I finished it in a single sitting between dinner and bed.  Absolutely amazing.  Almost makes me want to work with thicker threads!  (Not that I plan to do so anytime in the imminent future.  Fine threads may take four times as long, but the results they produce are simply stunning.)

I have also finished the last little bits of the garden – planted two pepper plants yesterday and transplanted the mint from smaller containers to larger ones.  I now have two large, long containers (3-4 feet long and 12 inches wide), one of spearmint and one of peppermint.  This is definitely overkill – I only use a few sprigs a week – but I love mint and it tends to get potbound in small containers.  Maybe I’ll make mint ice cream this summer!

I also helped set up the boards for the Special Sample Service at CNCH.  This is a CNCH tradition where members donate samples to be sold at CNCH – a fundraiser for CNCH and a chance for conference goers to get a wide array of samples for relatively low prices.  The samples are lovely and I urge you to visit the Special Sample Service booth at CNCH.  (And to send in samples for the next CNCH!)

Today the plan is to finish warping the scarves, and modify the drafts I chose to make them weavable on a 24-shaft straight twill threading.  Mike and I are also going to break up the concrete patio slab that is currently crowding the lemon tree, and I’ll put in some more pavers to replace it, in the parts that need replacing.

Speaking of the lemon tree, the advice I got from the local nursery is not to prune it until winter, so all in all, I think I’ll leave out the pruning for now, except to get rid of deadwood.  I think eventually I will get rid of the worst crossing branches, but I don’t plan to prune it anywhere near as drastically as a “normal” fruit tree – from everything I’ve read, citrus doesn’t need a whole lot of pruning.