Something to celebrate

Last week Jeremy and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary. We decided to do some projects together to celebrate. The first one involved our Marigolds. We used them to dye some scarves we made and then we silkscreened them! The second one involved making gourd birdhouses for our garden!

Here are pictures from the scarves first!

So this is about 2lbs of marigold from our garden, picked when they are just showing signs of wilting and/or wilting.

If you don't like the smell of marigolds, you should do this outside. Actually, I do like the smell of marigolds and I still recommend doing this outside... it produces a big old smell cloud!  Add enough water to cover (about half of the pot) and boil!

Here we are adding our cotton to the boiling bath!

Right before adding the fabric we added our alum and thats when you can really see the yellow developing and becoming more opaque. This needs to cook for at least an hour for the dye to really set in.

The smell finally got to us! Here it is outside all cooked and ready for rinsing. That white band on the top is some underwear we tried to experimentally dye. (it worked and is adorable)

We were stoked! Wow its yellow! Even brighter than we thought it would be!

Here is the finished product:

Inside the circles drawn by Jeremy it says, "J L A" Jeremy Loves Allyson or vice-versa for our 7 year anniversary! I feel so lucky that I found this man in the world and I get to share everything with him.

I also printed a stars screen on the back of mine! :)

p.s.

Is your cat a jerk? We should start a support group! This is fricky "helping" us cut the fabric for our project. She is lucky she is so cute.

Okay, birdhouses are next! As you may have noticed, we tried to stretch our anniversary celebration as far as possible. The week before our anniversary someone asked us if we were newly-weds and it was such a huge compliment that we seemed so! More soon, Allyson