Cotton Country

Boy, it's hard to believe it's almost here.  The Heritage Knitting Retreat.  Jane and I have been working for 2 years for this weekend and we're more than excited.  If you can still join us, please let me know.  If you're not able to join us, we've developed a workbook and companion cd that will be available for purchase. 

In the midst of everything else, I've been bitten by the cotton bug.  It's causing a little bit of distraction.  I think we're going to get there but it's definitely a distraction.

I started with this dyed cotton from the Woolery:

As you can see, I haven't gotten much further with this cotton, mostly because I got drawn into this cotton:

This is organic cotton which is naturally colored.  It actually grows this color, commonly called coyote.  The interesting thing about this cotton is that, once it's spun up and boiled (to get the natural goo off), it will be a darker color.  It's doesn't go quite brown but it's definitely towards that color.

This is this almost 1 ounce spun on my Fricke using the fastest whorl using my version of a long draw.

And this will be my next project, tri-colored cotton, all naturally colored.  But it will have to wait until after the weekend!

Edited because I completely forgot to show you this.  My mother, who can grow anything on God's green earth, accepted the challenge to try to grow some cotton plants from seed I spun from.  Here's her little babies: