A dye shed at last

I have never had a dye shed. I have lived in several different houses since I started dyeing my own yarn and always I have crouched in carports, kneeled on porches, struggled with the wind blowing out my burners, dropped yarn in the dirt, frozen in blizzards, carted heavy buckets of water for hundreds of miles... But THIS particular rental house had this little building at the back of the yard. I thought nothing of it when we moved here as it was stuffed with trash.

...including the storm windows for every window in this house, every single one broken. (Just as an aside now that is summer and hot, not a single window in this house opens. They are all painted shut.) The entire property was full of junk actually. Emily worked for days to get it all out of the yard.  She cleaned out all that broken glass as well as piles of broken bits of this and that... bird feeders, rake heads, an old dog bed peed upon by many mice, pain buckets half full of hardened paint in an assortment of colors (our landlord is a house painter which might explain why the windows are all painted shut), a variety of dead bugs and other critters, and some sort of mid-sized animal trap (perhaps related to the skunks--see prior skunk blog posts referenced HERE). Emily cleaned it all out (after the yard unfroze--the detritus came to light in layers as the snow melted, the last being a generous covering of cigarette butts) and quickly proved that her desire for weekly trash pick-up was warranted.

This is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received--and I didn't realize it until today when I got out all my dye stuff to get some yarn ready for a workshop next month. Here is the inside of my new little paradise. Yes, that is an old propane stove riddled with bullet holes. Though it is still hooked up to a propane tank which may or may not contain propane, I will not be using it.

Here is my new dye stove which is significantly beefier than my old one which is languishing somewhere in a storage locker. After multiple attempts to find it somewhere between the loom parts and the piano, I gave up and bought this one. It has legs. I don't have to bend over so much. This is good as the 11th anniversary of my 29th birthday is coming up in a couple months and sometimes parts get creaky.

I couldn't be more thrilled.  Every time I go out there to stir a pot or shift them around I giggle a little bit and skip over the grass. A dye shed! Imagine.