Fermentation of our home produce, kitchen equipment & indigo dyeing

My husband and I were watching a YouTube video a few days ago, discussing the fermentation of garden produce.  Here's a link to the video. Fermentation for Dummies with Doug & Stacy

In this video, Stacy discussed the system she uses for preserving her home produce.  She mentioned a fermentation starter kit, which really interested me.  So, I got on Amazon & looked for it.  We received our started kit yesterday.  Here's the link for the started kit.  Masontop's complete mason jar fermention kit

The kits comes complete with:

Pipes, pebbles & pounder

Fermentation guide

I'll be reading the guide & posting my experiments here in this blog.

When we moved here, back in 2006, I invested in some "kitchen" equipment from Lehman's.  We got a Big Berkey water filtering system, Big-berkey-with-black-berkey-elements

a grain mill, Lehmans-own-hand-cranked-grain-mill

and a sauerkraut crock.  European-style-fermenting-crocks-3-gallon/fermenting-pickling

I haven't used the sauerkraut crock yet.  The water filter is in daily use.  The grain mill has been used, but not very often.

I've also invested in a butter churn this past Christmas, which I look forward to using.  (I need a new local source for raw milk). I bought one for my friend Gena Stout for her birthday, and one for myself.

Kilner-butter-churn

On Tuesday, April 25th,  Gena Stout & Karna McFadden came over for a dye day.  We had a great time.  I dyed handspun fingering weight Cheviot wool and some commercial DK weight wool I had used for knitting kilthose in the past.  I used the "turkey roaster" to hold the skeins.  I sprinkled the dye powder directly onto the skeins.  I used Turkey Red, Pansy & Sapphire from the Woolery. The Woolery.com

They have a great starter kit.  Country-classics-starter-kit.html

Here's how my skeins came out.

Gena & Karna focused on the indigo vat, with dyes we got from Dharma Trading Company.  They have been studying shibori, the Japanese art of dyeing.
Indigo-dye-kit.html

Shibori is a fascinating technique.  The "original" tie dye, in fact.  The fabric to be dyed is sewn, tied and/or folded to produce the finished design.  The more complicated designs take HOURS of preparation.  A great deal of information on this technique can be found on Pinterest. Or you can choose from a great number of books.  I was initially introduced to Shibori while I was stationed in Japan (1985 - 1988).  Here's some of Gena's experiments...