Winterfyllith

October, in the Saxon calendar, was known as Winterfyllith presumably because it was when you first began to feel the winter in the air, like a premonition that drives you inside. The last of the harvest is coming in, and life begins to turn to an enclosed rather than an open-air life. Before mechanized society, the colder months were the time when fiber arts came into their own. Cold and inclement weather drove folk inside to sit by the fireplace, and there were fleeces and flax to deal with, and the entire winter, up until sowing time greeted them, to work on the ever-present need for clothing.

Right now, I’m sitting here and typing with a basket of wool beside me, and a drop spindle. As things load on the computer, I spin another few inches. I also spin while watching TV, or in the doctor’s office. Until you’ve had sole responsibility for turning several dirty fleeces into fabric, you don’t appreciate what our ancestors managed to do again and again, every year. Our sheep - four Rambouillet-Romney crosses and a Cheviot - turn out several pounds of wool apiece that needs to be washed thoroughly (three soaks in warm water and gentle soap, three rinses) but not so thoroughly that it removes the valuable lanolin. It needs to be carded, or in the case of particularly weed-tangled wool, picked through by hand. Then it needs to be spun, washed again to remove the last of the lanolin, spun into two plies, soaked and dried to set twist, mordanted, dyed, wound on spools, and then woven into a garment. It’s a huge amount of work.

Throughout much of history, fiber arts were often, although not always, women’s work. There are recorded instances of male spinners; for example, when flax was “dressed” on a distaff, it was supposed to be wound with a ribbon - blue or green for an unmarried woman, red or pink for a married woman, and black for a man. In medieval times, more professional weavers and dyers were men than women. However, it was women who did most of the fiber arts work on a nonprofessional scale, for their families. This was largely a matter of physical roles; fiber arts became women’s work (especially older women’s work) because it took little strength and one could do it while watching children or a pot. The term “spinster”, or its forgotten variant “webster”, came to refer to an unmarried woman long past the traditional age of marriage. Such “spinsters” often used fiber arts as a way of contributing to the families they stayed with; the larger the family, the more likely they were to need clothes and the more valued the work of a full-time fiber artist would be.

There are several ways to get your own fiber. The most common, of course, is to keep a spinning flock of wool sheep. The other alternative is to grow your own vegetable fibers - most notably linen or cotton, but there are others as well. Keeping sheep is a good choice because you are pretty much guaranteed a fiber harvest regardless; barring unforeseen emergencies, the sheep will grow wool and need to be sheared. Plant fiber crops run the risk of going under to weather. On the other hand, some people are allergic to wool, and keeping a flock of animals has its own difficulties, especially if you have not much space, not much pasture, and may not be using the other side benefits of sheep, namely spring lambs to butcher.

Cotton only grows in southern climates, and the amount you could grow in a greenhouse isn’t enough to do much of anything with. If you live where it will grow, it’s an obvious crop. If you live in a more northern area, linen - the most finicky of the three common fibers - might be a better choice.

If you’re planting a fiber garden, like any other garden, the climate will dictate what you’ll be able to grow. Unlike vegetables or herbs, you have to grow a whole lot of a fiber plant to have enough to do anything reasonable with - say, an eighth of an acre, and preferably more. In warm climates, you can grow cotton, which grows on small bushes full of fluffy white bolls. If you’re in a very hot, wet area and you’re interested in growing some of the coarser fibers for making ropes, sandals, sacks, mats, etc. you might look into such plants as jute, Indian hemp, bowstring hemp, coconut “coir”, abaca, and sisal. Yucca, which has similar uses, grows almost anywhere.

If you’re more northerly, you can try nettles, which although a nasty stingy plant, has a lovely fiber nearly as nice as flax; you need to grow it very tall (and dangerous) in well-composted ground. It can be processed in the same way as flax fibers, and is supposedly even more durable; harvest with care. The stingy bits rot away with the retting process. It was a favorite of Norse and Germanic peoples, who called it “Nesselgarn”. The faery tale of the Seven Swans or Seven Ravens has a young girl forced by a geas to break a spell on her ensorcelled brothers by weaving them shirts of nettle fiber.

Hemp is a wonderful fiber plant, and I eagerly await its eventual legalization, not because I smoke marijuana, which I don’t, but because I want to get my hands on and grow fiber hemp, which is a slightly different variety and not much good for smoking purposes. Unfortunately it has been outlawed with the other sorts of hemp. It is sacred to Shiva, and he is the one to pray to for our eventual use of it.

The oldest fiber crop of all is flax; samples of Egyptian linen have been found dating to several thousand years ago. Growing flax is hard work, and processing it is even more difficult. However, once you’ve got the flax fibers, they are the easiest of all plant fibers to actually spin. When you buy flax seed, make sure you get the fiber sort; it’s actually comparatively rare and hard to get. Most flax seed is of the sort that makes linseed oil - lots of seeds and not much long fiber.

Flax should be grown in fertile ground, a week or so before your last frost date. Let it grow until just before frost (which will kill and damage it) and then pull it up by the roots and spread it in a building to dry thoroughly. The perfect moment to pull up the flax plants is when the seedheads are just turning from green to tan color, and the stalk is yellow up to about two-thirds of its height. Then you “ripple”, the flax, which is to pull the stalks through a block of wood with several rows of nails sticking up like teeth, which pops the seedheads off the top of the stems. If you want the seeds, for livestock feed, next year’s seeding, pressing for oil, or anything else, pound the bolls with a rock until they break open and then winnow away the chaff. This is called “riveling”.

The next step is to “ret” it, which is an old word for rot. You can “dew-ret” it by leaving it out for a few weeks on the grass, turning it periodically, until the dew rots off the outer stalk, but i prefer water-retting. To do this, you need a non-bare-metal pool or tank of stagnant water - an old bathtub does well - filled with lukewarm water. Put the bundles of flax in, weight them down, and leave them overnight. Then drain the tank, fill it again with fresh water, and put them back in. Now, morning and night, about twelve hours apart, carefully scoop out a pitcher or two of brown, scummy water (the amount removed should be about one-tenth of the total volume) and put in the same amount of fresh water. Do it slowly; don’t disturb the anaerobic growth in the water.

There are a variety of ways to figure out when it’s done. If you have access to litmus paper, check the acidity of the water periodically, which will increase with time. Somewhere around 5 or 4.5 on the pH scale, the acidity will stay at the same rate for a six- to ten-hour period. At this point, it should be done. If you don’t have litmus paper, observe the flax. The fibers should be standing out from the straw. If you pull out a stem and let it dry for a day or two, you should be able to snap it in half and see the chaff fall away, leaving fiber clean and free. When it’s done, rinse it and let it dry in the sun so as to prevent mold. It can then be stored until the following spring, or whenever you have time to get around to working with it.

The next step is to break it, which is done with a tool called a break, which looks rather like a large paper-cutter with blunt wooden blades instead of sharp metal ones. The flax is passed through it, slamming the break as you go, until the brittle outside layer starts to fall away, leaving the fiber intact. Then you “scutch” it, which requires scraping the last of it away with a dull knife. Make sure you stack the fibers with the blossom-ends and root-ends all going the same way. Then you “hackle” or “hetchel” it, which uses items much like a larger version of the ripple. These are the source of the term “get your hackles up”, and pulling the hanks through them separate out the fibers, making them ready to spin.

Before spinning the flax, you put it on a distaff. This tool was so common a sight that it became almost a metaphor for women’s work; it came in different varieties, form the simple pole distaff (which was no more than just that) to the lantern distaff (which is a pole with thin bent saplings forming an ovoid bulb at the top) to the comb distaff, which is a narrow flat board with carved teeth at the top for the flax to be draped over. You take your hank of flax and make a light fan of some of it across your lap, with the root end at the “point” and the blossom ends spread out. Then bring the hank back the other way, making a second fan with fibers that criss-cross the first one, and keep doing this back and forth until it’s done. Roll the fan up around your distaff, root ends at the top and blossom ends down, and tie a string around it, criss-crossing it all the way down, or you can use a ribbon of the appropriate color.

When you spin, you’ll be pulling the blossom ends out one at a time, spinning it like wool, except that flax is spun with wet fingers in order to get the fibers to stick, so keep a bowl of water handy. Some old-time spinning wheels actually had water cups built in. If you handspin, stick the distaff in your belt; if you’re using a wheel, attach it to that.

I had a strange experience with hand-spinning. I had learned to do it years before, from a woman who I’d begged to teach me, but more than fifteen years had intervened before I had the right combination of events to push me back into it. These included a flock of sheep who had been freshly sheared; five fleeces just sitting there, waiting to be dealt with; a wife with carpal tunnel syndrome who couldn’t handle spinning but who could, however, carve me a beautiful Viking-style soapstone-whorl spindle just like the ones shown on TV archaeological shows, and a long, boring winter.

I tried for three hours, the first night, to remember how it had been done. I’d been able to make a string, I was sure, but somehow my fingers wouldn’t do it right. There was no one around for miles that I could ask, and anyway it was the middle of the night. So I asked aloud, “Athene, would you help me with this? I’m having trouble here.”

About 30 seconds later, a huge spider - and I do mean enormous, like one of those ones that looks like it ate your brother and has designs on you - scurried out from under the piano and headed straight for me. Now, I’m not fond of spiders in general, because they frighten visitors and I hate cleaning up their webs, so I picked up my shoe to kill it. Just as I was about to make it a black splotch on the floor, however, I remembered that the spider was one of Athene’s creatures and I had just called on her, after all. And it would be extremely rude to kill a divine messenger one has just put in a request for. So I put my shoe down and sat very, very still, breathing rather hard, I’m afraid, as it ran right between my bare feet and vanished under the couch I was sitting on.

At that point, I figured it was moot anyway, because I’d never be able to find it and kill it now. So I picked up the spindle and got back to work. And wonder of wonders, the yarn began to happen, just like that. I suddenly had the hang of it, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I guess Athene sent a professional over to help with the spinning magic. So be careful what you ask for; it may not come in the package you expect.

Athena’s not the only goddess associated with spinning; in the old Norse religion both Frigga, Odin’s wife, the patron of marriage, hearth, and home; and Frau Holle or Holda, lady of sacred industrious housecleaning who lived down a well in the underworld, were associated with spinning. Frigga is seen as drawing the thread of Life out of the void and spinning it into new life that can be born from living bodies. Frau Holle is more of a crone figure and as such spins magic which can affect or limit an individual. The three Fates, called the Moerae in Greece and the Norns in Scandinavia, were also shown as spinning, weaving and cutting the thread of each life; fiber arts are a metaphor for Destiny.

Spinning is a round art. For centuries, people have talked about “spinning spells”, because spinning is the art of creating a spiral. Spirals are sacred because they symbolize the Two-In-One; the “male” line and “female” circle are combined. Our very DNA, the stuff that we and all other living things on this planet are made of, is composed of a double spiral. Spirals hold energy and power coiled like a spring, ready to release it bit by bit. Spinning magic is related to knot magic, or hair-braiding magic; the idea that power can be “tied up” in something and then released. It’s why sailors bought “knots” of wind from witches, and why women always unbraided their hair when another woman was giving birth in the house, in order to “unbind” the baby....and why spinning has always been associated with magic.

When you spin fiber, whether it’s wool, flax, cotton, silk, or angora, you take separate strands and spiral them into one single tight strand. If you do it while concentrating on a particular thing, perhaps visualizing your will and imagining it pouring into the strands that pass between your fingers, you can spin a pretty decent spell. The yarn or thread will be “charged”, and ready to use in whatever way you prefer. If you then weave or knit or crochet it into a particular item whilst using the same trick, it will be even more potent.

The first handspinning you learn will probably be on a drop spindle, because they are cheap and easy to make and you can take them with you. Their portability means that even after buying a fancy wheel, many handspinners bring the drop spindle with them to work on during boring moments. I’ve done drop-spinning on the bus, in the doctor’s office, in the jury duty pool room, and in the car while my wife shopped inside stores I wasn’t interested in. If you’re a serious handspinner, you’ll end up with two or three drop spindles of different weights for spinning different kinds of fiber and different grades of thread. It’s not too farfetched an idea to dedicate them to different kinds of magic, too.

A drop spindle consists of a round whorl and a stick. I prefer a heavy spindle, so I use a classic Viking-style spindle with a soapstone whorl. (I remember how excited I was in seeing the archaeological finds in the ancient Norse settlements in Canada on TV, and seeing unearthed soapstone drop spindle whorls exactly like the one I was holding in my hand, spinning while I watched.) The whorl can be decorated with any mandala-like design, from flower petals to a sun to a snowflake to an abstract circular symbol. As it spins, it will radiate its power. Decide if you simply want to empower your spindle, or if you want to dedicate it to a particular type of magic. For example, you could put elemental symbols on it for magical purposes - a spindle painted with flames might be charmed to spin “energetic” fiber, or one with clouds “imaginative” stuff. I know of one witch who swears that a plain white spindle whorl is best for “calming” or “sleepy” energy, and uses it to put her rowdy kids to sleep.

Remember that any decor you put on should be of a sort that won’t rub off and get on your fiber. A spindle whorl is subject to a good deal of slow friction over the years, so paint can rub off if you don’t use really good paint. Carving is probably the safest method; if the only paint you have it cheap stuff, paint the bottom of the whorl where the fiber doesn’t get wrapped. It’ll work just as well.

If you spin a lot of wool - and the fleeces of half a dozen sheep can get to be quite a lot of work to process - you will eventually graduate to a spinning wheel. The wheel hub of a spinning wheel can be decorated in the same way as the whorl of a spindle, and with all the same uses. One friend of mine who liked to go into an altered state while spinning pasted a cardboard disk with a spiral on it to the hub of her spinning wheel, and it was pretty psychedelic to look at.

The next step, after the yarn is spun, is usually dyeing, unless you intend to weave or knit with the natural undyed fiber. There are many wonderful dye plants that you can use; some are easy and some hard to grow. If you’re wary of expensive plants, start with vegetables like Bulls’ Blood beets or yellow onions. Although many plants are useful for a small amount of dye, the ones I’ve had the best luck with are as follows:

Blues: The hardest color of all. You can have indigo if you live in a warm climate, although you will have to go through a long process to get it out that includes baking soda and chemical reducing agents. Japanese indigo - Polygonum tinctorum - has a lesser amount of the same stuff and can be grown in colder climates, but it’s hard to get hold of. I’d like to see it more popular here. Woad, the traditional plant for Old European blues, has even less of the stuff and makes dusty blues; it’s very cold-hardy and is a weed in some states. Blue is the color of serenity.

Reds: The next hardest color. The best plant-red is from madder roots; Bulls’ Blood beets give a dark red; safflower and dyer’s alkanet give an orange-red; dyer’s alkanet and lady’s bedstraw roots give a brick-to-coral-orange. Another red comes from imported cochineal, which is actually the dried bodies of certain insects. Bloodroot will give red dyes from its root, but it’s poisonous enough that spinning bloodroot-dyed yarn, or wearing wet bloodroot-dyed fabric next to the skin, will make you quite ill. If you must use it, don’t use it on clothing that will be worn regularly, and dye fabric, not yarn. It might be appropriate for an altar cloth for certain warlike and belligerent deities. Orange-reds are for war-gods; blue-reds for blood-goddesses.

Purple: Also difficult. The best purple of all comes from a woodland tree fungus, Umbilicaria, which yields a deep purple dye when soaked in water, but it’s found only rarely, in northern forests, and shouldn’t be overpicked. If you do find a patch, don’t take more than half. The snails of the Mediterranean that made “royal purple” dye when boiled down actually produced a crimson color. Flowers of hibiscus and dark red or black hollhocks will give a dark red-violet, and purple basil yields a purple-brown. Hopi dye amaranth and Hopi dye sunflower give dark purple-reds. Most purple is actually made by blue and red overdyeing.

Greens: Easier to find, although the classic “Lincoln Green” of Robin Hood’s Merry Men was made by overdyeing woad with weld. Use sunflowers, Queen Anne’s Lace, lily-of-the-valley, and dyer’s greenweed. Green is the color of all nature and the wild, and also the fairies’ color.

Yellows to yellow-oranges: The single easiest color to get, yellow dye can be found in yellow onion skin, goldenrod, hops, weld, lady’s bedstraw tops, cosmos, dyer’s coreopsis, regular coreopsis, dyer’s chamomile, henna, zinna, yarrow, black-eyed susan, marigold, dahlias, and tansy. The shades will be as different as you can imagine, from brown-gold to pale saffron, depending on mordant and the particular batch. There is no way to tell from batch to batch what your yarn will look like, anyway. Yellow is the color of the sun, and gives bright, solar, “wake-up” energy.

Browns: Purple loosestrife, that spreading weed, gives a nice brown dye of different shades. Pull as much as you want of it; there’s no shortage and indeed it’s considered a plant predator. St. John’s Wort will give brownish-green, brownish-red, brownish-gold, or just brown depending on mordant and length of soak. Dried, crumbled oak tree bark makes nice browns as well. Coffee and tea work in a pinch. Any of the yellow plants will give brown if you soak them long enough. Brown is the color of the Earth and work and practicality.

Black and grey: Because iron “saddens” or greys dyes, always mordant black or grey with iron, even if it’s just a matter of simmering the yarn and dye in an iron pot. Black can be made from ground walnut hulls, which give a dark brown in a non-iron pot and nearly black in an iron one. Meadowsweet roots also have been used for black dye, as has gipsywort, so-called because the Romany supposedly used it to darken the hair of runaway children who had joined their tribe and needed to be camouflaged from the authorities. Black is the color of power, death, and the mysteries.

Weaving is not a round art like spinning; it is an art of criss-crossing lines. It is a magical art along the lines of 2 rather than 1 mystically; of I-Thou rather than I Eternal. You have two sets of threads going in opposite directions that may or may not be very different, and they intersect along every possible point, creating a beautiful and useful pattern. Sounds kind of like a good relationship, doesn’t it? Weaving is linked mythically to Fate; of the three Fates or Moerae or Norns, the central and usually most important one is The Weaver, Lachesis/Verdandi, She Who Shapes Life. Magic is closely associated with weaving; one even speaks of weaving spells as if they were done by the same careful process.

You can actually weave spells, however. The simplest method is to visualize something over and over while weaving a piece of fabric on a loom. You can even chant if you like - the rhythmic bang of the beater is excellent for keeping time and creating a trance state. Since it takes a long time to weave something, that’s a lot of time and energy to put into a spell, which will make it all the more potent. The article can be a wall hanging for the house, or a piece of clothing to be used for a magical purpose. Another method is to actually weave a symbol of the desired goal into the cloth, using tapestry weaving techniques.

You can also make a permanently woven screen by creating a wooden frame, winding it with string or yarn or thread, and then weaving things into it. This can be as conventional as just thread, or as unusual as having many magical objects wound through it. I helped someone do a looking-for-love spell this way; she had rescued an old Tarot deck with several cards missing from the trash, and used some of the remaining cards for her spell. She put in the King of Wands, for a mature, active man, and the Two of Cups for romance, and the Ten of Cups for a happy home, and the Three of Coins for someone with an actual job, and the Magician for someone interesting and skilled, and so forth. You can weave in photos, pictures, or dried flowers; you can weave initials in with thick yarn; you can run ribbons through it in order to color a large space quickly. Stand the screen up in your house or hang it on the wall like a work of art. If you make it of weatherproof materials, you can make and keep it outside. This can be accomplished by tying two long branches horizontally to two adjacent trees, and creating the weaving across them, which makes a really excellent property protection spell.

One way to weave a spell is to use the Celtic Ogham alphabet. Each of the letters has an associated tree, bird, and color. With a neutral weft, different colors of yarn can be used to spell out a word or simple phrase, or else the warp can also be strung to match for a tartan effect. The desired goal is then woven secretly, again and again, into the piece of fabric. It’s best to put the finished piece somewhere it can be seen regularly - for example, making it into a wall hanging or curtain, or a cape to be worn frequently.

The Ogham letter colors are as follows (in Roman alphabet order for easy use):

A: (Ailm) “Piebald” or twisted black and white. Spin a thread of each color together for this one.
B: (Beth) Traditionally one of two “whites”; I use off-white or ivory for this one and pure white for I.
C: (Coll) Dark brown.
D: (Duir) Black.
E: (Eadha) Scarlet.
F: (Fearn) Crimson.
G: (Gort) Sky blue.
H: (Huath) Deep purple.
I: (Idho) Pure white.
J: Actually, there is no J in the Ogham alphabet. I use lavender.
K: (Koad) Medium green.
L. (Luis) Light grey.
M: (Muin) Blue-violet.
N: (Nion) Traditionally “clear”; I use a pale blue.
NG: (Ngetal) “Glass-green”, meaning blue-green; aquamarine.
O: (Onn) Tan or dun.
P: (Peith) Pink.
Q: (Quert) Beige or “mouse-colored”.
R: (Ruis) “Roebuck red”, or red-brown russet color.
S: (Saille) Yellow.
T: (Tinne) Iron-grey.
Th: (Tharan) Pale yellow.
U: (Ura) “Resin-colored”, meaning deep gold or honey-color.
V: No, there’s no V either. I use bright orange.
W: Nope, no W either. I use light orange.
X: No X. I use dark green.
Y: No Y. I use pale green.
Z: (Straif) Dark blue.

The tools of the weaver’s trade are nearly as old as those of the spinner, and as durable in legend. The loom itself should have a spider or spiderweb drawn or painted on it somewhere, like the spinning wheel and drop spindle, in order to gain the blessing of Spider spirit, be she incarnated in Athene or Grandmother Spider. The shuttle should have Laguz, the Rune of Water, on it so that the thread will flow as smoothly and quickly as a waterfall.

If you want to weave a magic enspelled item, such as a magical piece of clothing, or a ceremonial item such as a ritual altar cloth or vestment, start with the warp of the loom. As you thread it, name off a quality or a blessing with each strand, or just repeat a simple mantra or rhyme with each strand you pull through the heddles. When the loom is fully strung and you are ready to start the weft, wind the weft-yarn onto the shuttle as if you were winding up a spring, ready to unwind and spring its energy into the workings of your sorcery. Take several deep breaths and begin to weave, concentrating on your goal. I always make the first pass of the shuttle between the warp threads with my eyes closed.

Knitting is neither circular nor crossing; its back-and-forth twisted path recalls the labyrinth, which turns abrupt corners and circles back to its original place. Like labyrinths, knitting can also be used as magic, especially as a protection spell. Really, it’s about making lots of little knots in thread, and as such partakes of the nature of knot magic - tying the energy up into a coiled spring and keeping it there, to release only a little at a time over a period of many, many years. Crochet and macrame work in much the same manner. Knit your piece of work, with a chant, rhyme, spoken phrase, or just a concentrated thought every time you turn the corner; visualize it as turning one more corner in a great labyrinth whose center holds the result you want.

There is nothing more ordinary, or more sacred, than clothing; it surrounds us at all times and we forget how important it is to our survival. It tells everyone who sees us huge volumes of information about us, our taste, judgment, wealth, job, and self-image. Everyone has some favorite piece of clothing that they love; many of us have some piece that we credit with almost magical abilities - the lucky shirt, the old bathrobe that makes us feel warm and safe, the jacket we bought with our first paycheck that gets worn on all job interviews. The art of clothing yourself and others is taken for granted today; we are light-years away from the days when every piece of clothing was hand-made by someone; usually the women of the household, barring that a tailor slaving in his shop. However, wearing even one piece of clothing - a shawl, a wrap, a scarf - that you made yourself, from fiber to garment, is an amazing change of consciousness. You will never look at our spinster, webster, and tailor ancestors and their enduring persistence the same way again, and you will find the honor in the chain they have spun, the woven thread through time.

The Winterfyllith Recipe: Bull’s Blood Beet Borscht

Bull’s Blood beets, of which it is worth while growing a whole lot, are not only a good thing to eat but make a nice reddish dye as well. The problem with borscht is that when you cook the beets for a while, they lose their color, so for red beets in a red broth, you really need to cook a bunch of beets until all the color is gone out of them, fish out the blanched beety bits and give them to the livestock (or save them for vegetable filler in any dish) and chop fresh beets to be cooked only until soft in the red broth. And if you’re going to be cooking beets ahead for their red juice, it makes sense to cook an extra round of beet juice and set it aside to dye mordanted yarn.

So......cook one batch in enough water to cover it, pull out the beet bits, set it aside on low heat to simmer with yarn in it, cook a second batch, fish out the beet bits and discard or save for another dish, and then chop a third batch into it and cook until just done. At the same time that you add the last batch of beets, add2 or 3 chopped carrots, a finely chopped onion, and a cup of very finely shredded red cabbage. It should take 20 or 30 minutes to get them all soft, but not to let the beets bleed white. Then add 2 cups of some sort of meat stock (if you want to keep it vegetarian, just add more water, and maybe some herbs), 1 tablespoon of butter, and 1 tablespoon of vinegar, preferably red wine vinegar. Cook for about 10 more minutes.

Spoon the soup into bowls, and add a generous dollop of sour cream to each dish; let the diners stir it in themselves to their taste. Keep checking the yarn in the beet juice. You may want to put in a few skeins and then pull them out at different times, to get lighter and darker shades. Four hours is about as long as the dyebath will go, although you can let the final skein sit and soak overnight in a cold dyebath. Rinse and hang to dry. Dinner and dyeing, in one fell swoop!