Fridge Pickles: hurry up and wait.

My first batch of Apple Cider Vinegar got done this week (there will be a tutorial on that as well) and I was eager to try making something with it.  A friend suggested fridge pickles, as I recently was given a large cucumber from someone's garden.  This is a very simple project and only took a few minutes to complete.  I love home made pickles because they can easily be customized to anyone's tastes.  Also, fridge pickles are much easier than canned or fermented pickles and anyone can make them!
For this project, you will need vinegar, water, and salt, as well as something to be pickled, spices of your choice, and a jar.

Within this list, there are a number of factors that you can customize to your taste.  Any vegetable can be pickled, and you can choose to pickle them raw for crunchier pickles, or blanched (in your brine) for softer pickles.  You can also choose any type of vinegar.  I chose ACV since I made it myself, and it is one of the most beneficial types of vinegar.  Salt should be non-iodized.  I chose a pickling salt we had in the cupboard.  Also, you can choose any spices that you enjoy!  I chose dried local dill, peppercorns, a spicy pepper from a friend's garden, coriander, and cumin.  I used 1/2 tsp of each spice.  Finally, if you like sweet pickles, you can add a tsp of sugar (or more if you want).  I chose not to use sugar, as I like sour pickles.

First, bring the following to a boil; 1 cup water, 1 cup vinegar, and 1 Tbsp salt.  Boil until the salt is dissolved.  In the mean time, cut up your veggies and put them in the jar with your seasonings.

Cover the veggies and spices with the brine and cover.  At this point, I like to label with the date the pickles will be done.  You should wait a minimum of two weeks, but three weeks is better.

That's it!  As you can see, it's a simple, quick process, with ample and tasty rewards.  Enjoy!
Feel free to leave comments on spice or vegetable combinations you try, and how they turn out!

Everything turned out better than expected!

In my last post, I was convinced that my yarn dyeing experiment had been a failure.  I couldn't have been farther from the truth!  Once they dried, both of the yarns I died in black beans were surprisingly, beautifully colored!  The yarn that started out white ended up having a nice mixture of beige and baby blue with spots of red from the yarn I tied the skein with.

I am most enamored with the alpaca yarn.  Where it was a light brown, it picked up a light, silvery blue that compliments it's dark brown streaks perfectly.  I am so pleased with the results, it is better than I could have hoped for!

The transformation from fiber to yarn has been an amazing one, and a fantastic, though lengthy, process.  Just to give myself (and you) a visual representation of this process, I compared the yarn with a small piece of the original fiber.

As you can see, I wound both of my skeins of yarn into balls.  This is a personal choice and is not necessary.  Yarn can be kept in skeins until you are ready to use them.  I chose to wind them into a ball so the crochet process would go more smoothly.
The next, and final step, is to wind these beautiful works of art into a fabric!  Please comment with your suggestions of what I should make.  I have about 178 feet of the alpaca yarn, and considerably more of the other yarn.

If at first you don't succeed, dye, dye again.

In two of my previous posts, I began reviewing the process I have followed in processing yarn from fiber to fabric.  My last post on the subject led up to the point of immersing the yarn in the black bean water.
The yarn sat in the bean water for three days.  On the third day, mold began growing on the yarn itself, not the surface of the water.  I removed the yarn from the bean water and dumped the remaining dye.

Since the mold was growing on the yarn itself, I did my best to remove it by hand.  After doing this, the yarn still had a black goo on it from the mold.

The next step was washing the yarn.  I wanted to try to remove the black slime and also even out the Ph.  For this I made a bath of water and Dr. Bronner's.

The yarn that I purchased at Salvation Army had the worst mold damage and I am not sure it will be salvageable.  It picked up the color the best though and I ended up with a pale purplish grey.

The alpaca yarn that I made had much less mold damage and seems to have picked up a little color, but it is hard to tell what it will look like when it dries.

I hung the two up to dry in the bathroom.  It will likely take a few days until they are both dry.

I'm not sure what went wrong, but I'm pretty disappointed in the results.  One thing I will be sure to do next time is add sodium benzoate to the dye bath to keep it from molding.  I also think that there may have been an error with the mordant since neither of the yarns seemed to hold much color.

Although this first attempt at dyeing did not go well, I will still try again in the future.  I am not sure if I would go with black bean dye again however.  If you have any tips on what might have gone wrong, please let me know!