phila*craft

an afghan made with squares knit by fellow parents and dyed and pieced by me to be raffled off to benefit our children's school

MATERIALS: Henry's Attic Texas Bighorn yarn, Earthues madder, cochineal, cutch, osage orange and logwood gray extracts (packaged in a Botanical Shades kit with instructions and enough extract to dye 10lbs of fiber)
PATTERN: various textured squares from Barbara Walker's Learn to Knit Afghan Book assembled using Three Needle Bind Off and bordered with "Courthouse Steps" log cabin strips
NOTE: Extracts eliminate the need to steep your own dyestuffs and may produce more predictable results than dried and fresh plants, but I think they make the process seem abstract and therefore less engaging. I would use them again for dyeing a high volume of fiber, but I wouldn't want anyone who considers experimenting with natural dyes to miss out on crushing her own cochineal bugs.