That cold snap was a bit of a shock to the system. The only way to keep warm was to hang around in the shed and mess about with dyes.

I had a jar of agrocyte sitting in the sun in salted rainwater which had gone a nice deep yellow, so I popped in some wool during the hot spell, but by the time the chill arrived it was still pretty anaemic. The same could be said for some other wool I had put in with the dark brown fermented lichen. That turned out a pale fawn.

So I cooked them (individually) in the crock pot and that did little to improve the situation. So I started adding powdered acid dyes. The fawn had quarry and wombat added (dark  blue and dark brown, and it has been grabbing in various places with the result it is a multicoloured yarn. The yellow had Landscape lichen and wheat added, and is now multiple shades of yellow, brown and green (fairly close shades though so not shockingly different. This left me with the difficulty of what to do with it, so I also dyed up some red. There was quite a bit of that, and it was fairly tightly packed into the crock pot. So I put Coral and Kangaroo paw powder at the bottom, then sprinkled Clay on the other end, added water and cooked. It went clear long before the yarn was dyed, so I added the three colours in sequence as the water ran clear and it seemed to work pretty well.

But there were still some very light patches on the red, so I went looking for the gum tree that is supposed to give red colour. I had been told it is common in these parts and easy to spot as it has a blue bloom over the entire tree. So finding a tree that matched that description, I brought it home, added some suffolk yarn and one skein of the red, and cooked it. And got a medium green/brown. Still it filled in the pale gaps of the red and the suffolk picked up some of the red as well so I threw in the other two skeins, added some more leaves and now have three matching red skeins.

I have also finally got the Singer going - the drive band arrived promptly (thanks Fran for that tip) and was fitted, and then I fiddled around trying to get the bobbin thread to join the needle thread, only to discover the needle goes in a different position to my old Singer (flat bit to the left). Then putting the bits in the wrong position resulted in further problems which, when rectified allowed sewing. But the tension was all over the shop so I had to dismantle the tension button and re-set it (following instructions from Youtube), and I had a stitch. The wrong length stitch. So that took further reference to the manual and a bit of pot luck as the gauge is worn off, and still I had a bit of tension problem and the occasional missed stitch. A new sharp needle sorted out the stitch issue, and a twiddle with the bobbin tension, and voila - I have a fully functional machine! Now to work out what all the feet are for. I seem to have two types in duplicate, so will see if I can swap them with someone who has excess ordinary feet, as the less complicated feet are the ones missing from the set.