Adventures in Indigo-Dying

About a week ago I told you all about my recent adventures in tie-dying and promised a new project - dying a bedsheet set with indigo dye. Well, yesterday I spent a good chunk of the day setting up an indigo vat and spiral-dying our sheets. As you can see, they turned out great! The process was a little more tedious than tie-dying, as there are multiple dips and turning overs, but the great part is you don't have to wait 24 hours to see your results! As soon as the fabric is done resting, you just rinse it out in the tub and you can see your handiwork immediately. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me walk you through the steps to creating your very own beautifully blue sheet set.

(Click through for instructions!)

Adventures in tie-dying

 
When we started selling at the farmers markets about a month ago, we realized that having a backdrop of some sort was going to be a necessity if we wanted to keep up with the Jones's. Everyone's booths were so lovely with their custom signs and coordinated themes. We are on a serious budget, and we love to craft, so obviously we decided to make something ourselves. We'd been eying a tie-dye kit from Michael's for awhile, talking about making t-shirts as gifts or messing around with dying our sheets, and we decided that a bright tie-dyed background would be just the eye-catching thing we needed for our booth. 

We took the plunge and purchased the Jacquard Funky Groovy Tie-Dye Kit for about $10 (with the 20% off Michael's coupon readily found online). There are several other brands, but we chose this one because it comes with a soda ash solution that preps the material to accept dye. This means that your tie-dye will be brighter and won't bleed in the laundry. One important thing to note is that the fabric to be dyed needs to be 100% natural fibers - cotton, hemp, linen, etc. So our next challenge came in finding a large sheet at Goodwill that was 100% natural (and still had its tag so that we'd know). After unfolding and refolding about 20 flat sheets, we finally found one that would work. The directions in the tie-dye kit are detailed and easy to follow. The steps consist of dissolving the soda ash in a bucket of warm water, soaking the material for 20 minutes, rinsing it and laying it out on a large plastic tarp (we used a large blue camping tarp) and commencing to dye. 

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My Garden Grows - Part 2

Since the garden is doing so well, I thought I'd post some new photos of its progress. I'm happy with all of it except that the garlic and onions seem to be having a poor year. I've tried fertilizing and keeping up with watering, but they seem to have stopped growing. I'll wait and see! Otherwise everything looks beautiful and we found our first baby sugar-snap pea yesterday! 

 

The sugar-snap peas taking advantage of the trellis. I love these sweet curly tendrils!

The red beets and carrots are coming right along. I've been thinning them a little at a time so we can eat the tender greens in salads and stir-fries.

I'm especially happy with these tomatillo plants we got from Stoney Plains Organic Farm at the Wallingford Farmers Market. We've only had them a few weeks and they've shot up to over 2 feet tall with tons of blossoms!

These sweet mizuna blossoms are great in salads!

Marigolds are helping deter nematodes and flying insects while they attract slugs and snails away from the other plants.

I love that our garden is attracting so many pollinators.

And on that beautiful note, adieu!

Cold Blooded Killer

Gardening has changed me. And I don't mean that it has tied me closer with the soil or given me a greater appreciation for the work that goes into producing my food, although those things could be said as well. No, I'm referring to the unfortunate fact that gardening has turned me into a cold blooded killer. It's true. I've taken to stalking the garden just after dusk with a flashlight and a yogurt container, picking slugs and snails off my precious leaves. I'll spare you the details of what happens next, but rest assured that the crows have been eating really well. There have been slugs floating in beer traps, hopefully not agonizingly burned by the salt rings I've put around the basil pots (but if so, they really should know better than to slither into salt!) and painfully insulted when my temper gets the better of my tongue. And in case you didn't already know this, I am the girl who takes spiders out to the yard and ushers flies out the front door to avoid killing them! The love of my vegetables has turned me into a crazy killer. 

My poor basil was being devoured by tiny slugs!

Here are some things I've learned from trial and error as well as talking to some farmers at the farmers market.

• Marigolds planted around and amongst vegetables will deter some flying pests and nematodes. However, slugs and snails LOVE them. This could be good or bad. The slimy little buggers definitely zone in on the marigolds, so it's possible that they will leave the other vegetables mostly alone. Or this could be drawing them into the veggie beds when they wouldn't have shown up in the first place. Hard to say, but for their other pest-deterring properties I think Marigolds are a good integrated pest management (IPM) technique.   

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Bracelet to Necklace Transformation

Ever have the perfect bracelet for an outfit but what you really need is a necklace? Well friends, I have the solution for you. I have the most beautiful bracelet, made for me by my step-mom. While searching for a necklace the other day I spied this bracelet and a blue ribbon sitting side-by-side. I've been inspired lately by a lot of Kathleen Francis' Grosgrain designs, this one in particular, and knew what I needed to do.

So here's what you do in 4 easy steps. You'll need to use a bracelet that has at least one hoop-type closure (see picture):

1. Tie one end of the ribbon to the end of the bracelet with the non-hoop closure. Leave at least 2 inches of ribbon on that end.


2.  Put bracelet around your neck at desired length. I found it easiest to put the bracelet part in the back and the ribbon in the front, then turning it around after tying.

3. Thread the ribbon through the other end of the bracelet, the one with a hoop-closure.

4. Pull as tight as you wish and tie a one-loop bow with both ends of the ribbon.

I recommend wearing your hair up!

My garden grows! (Well, it will soon)

Yesterday the sun came out! We jumped into our shoes, hopped on our bikes and flew off to buy seeds. Until January of this year we've been regulars of Full Circle Farm and have feasted on delicious farm-grown vegetables. But in the spirit of saving money and producing more of our own food, we decided to put our membership on hold and see if we could survive on what our garden can grow. Then, of course, this unseasonably rainy spring arrived in Seattle! I know, I know, it's Seattle. It rains. But we normally get those sunny days peeking through and providing perfect planting days. It's a little later than hoped, but yesterday was finally one of those days that happily fell on a weekend!

There was a night in January when we were packing for a month-long trip to Mexico and we realized that we had forgotten to plant garlic and it would be too late by the time we got back. It was raining and muddy and I think it was about 2 in the morning. But we put our muck boots on and planted two garlic head's worth of cloves anyhow because, well, we love garlic even more than we love sleep.   

The little garlic plants poked their heads up a few weeks ago and they were interspersed with about 300 onions that came up from our landlords' seed from last year. We thinned the onions way down, moved them to one part of the raised bed along with two stray leeks that also showed up this year, and replanted our precious garlics in two rows. Two garlics into 22 plants! Not too shabby I say!

We also sowed in beets, carrots, yellow squash, sugar snap peas and bush beans, and there is still so much room!

The rain came back just as I was finishing laying the twine (ahem, yarn) along the rows. I'll keep you updated on how our little garden is growing!

Update:  Our landlords read this post and let us know that, oops! Those 300 onions were actually pesky ornamentals that they'd tried to get rid of but keep coming back!  So we pulled them and planted mizuna, something that can't easily be mistaken for any type of onion-family plant, in their spot. Ah the silly mistakes of the novice gardener! At least I didn't mistake water hemlock for parsley, as I hear is pretty common (and unfortunate!)