Tea at Trianon: Dyeing to Knit

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Dyeing to Knit

Artisan yarn on Maryland's Eastern Shore. To quote:

The Verdant Gryphon, located in a roomy warehouse in Easton’s Industrial Park, is not a retail yarn shop; instead, it is an independent yarn dyeing company. “We don’t have a regular walk-in business,” Gryphon explained. All the yarn is hand dyed in the warehouse, wound into individual hanks, and sold online.

“It is artisan work,” she said as we walked to the production area where spools of yarn in its natural state sat waiting to be turned into separate skeins and then dyed a multitude of colors. Gryphon has invented these colors; currently, a database stores 265 color recipes.

Two of her four staffers were “cooking the yarn,” the term used for dyeing the skeins in big pots of boiling water with a little acid. Four skeins were processing in each pot where the staffer had adroitly poured the color and now was stirring the boiling yarn to produce a rich color with some variegation. Once the skeins are cooked, they are soaked in a bath of soapy water, which sets the colors and prevents bleeding. (Read more.)