Brightening up a Gloomy Day with Color

I did not run outside today to take photos. I won’t have coreopsis flowers again until summer.

And then I’ll have all shades of brilliant yellow and fiery red flowers.

It is a lot of work to keep up with this crop. When they are blooming I harvest flowers every three days so that they will keep blooming.

These are dried hollyhock flowers from last year. Actually a friend gave these to me because the gophers destroyed all of my hollyhocks. Or maybe it was rabbits. I know there were gopher tunnels, but the big 2’ thick stalks had huge chunks eaten away at the base.

This is the magical transformation these flowers make to yarn. That’s a coreopsis pot on the right and the dark hollyhocks on the left. Can you believe that they dye the yarn green?

This is some of the yarn I dyed last year.

I just finished dyeing two pots of yarn yesterday so that I could put together more kits for the popular Lineaate hat.

This hat was designed by Elizabeth Doherty and Gail Ravenscroft knit it using my Solano County produced yarn. The current kits use the hollyhock yarn or the coreopsis yarn along with white and a small amount of an accent color along the edge.

I am much more a weaver than a knitter and I wanted to make a kit for a woven project using the exact same amount of yarn. This is what I came up with. Now if I could just find my notes so that I can write that up for all you weavers out there.

By the way, did you know that they yarn is all grown by sheep who live about ten miles from here? For the last few years I have attended the shearing day at the Timm Ranch and selected the fleeces to be spun into this special yarn.

These sheep are a blend of Polypay, Ramboillet, and Targhee and grow a very soft wool.