Sunflower yarn + calendars + dyeing pork

I spun the sunflower-dyed fiber last night and it is really pretty! Check it out, posing with the peonies that just opened:

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The color seems even stronger when the yarn is “distilled” down from the fluff stage. The rest of my Friday afternoon and most of today was spent trying to integrate a standalone calendar application into my new shop’s website. Finally, I got it working (breathing major sigh of relief).

My boyfriend spent his afternoon with the Ten Minute Cooking School featurette at the end of Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon A Time In Mexico DVD, making cochinita pibil (recipe link). Given that he doesn’t cook much, this was a fairly ambitious undertaking. I had to hunt down banana leaves, fresh annatto and lots of other fun stuff for him during the week, not to mention buy a new blender and spice grinder.

How does this relate to dyeing? (because it does, grasshopper, it does!)

Annatto (bixa orellana), also known as achiote, bixa or uruku, is a natural red dye. Several Aveda products use annatto as a red colorant, including lipstick and color maintenance products for red hair, sourced from the Brazilian rainforest-native Yawanawa tribe. Some even call it “the lipstick tree.”

Long story short: not much went into the pork, so I think I’m going to have another dye experiment this week. If you’d like to play along, annatto is easy to find in well-stocked Mexican or Central American grocery stores (it was labeled ‘achiote’). It will stain your hands and countertops something fierce, too, so put down plastic or newspapers.

Tagged with: Dyeing, Websites