Guarding so many sheep, she felt it would be a waste not to make use of them, and since the island had many plants that could be used for dyeing, she decided to color the wool with these natural plants. The effect might not be as good as that of chemical materials, but it was purely natural, which also provided Aya with a more challenging job.
The island had both merino and mountain goats, generally, merino wool was used for textile materials.
Her family raised a group of mountain goats. The wool of mountain goats was short and not pure, while the merino wool encompassed the whole sheep, making it look particularly thick, so once the merino wool was sheared, the sheep felt much lighter.
Pleasure is something one must find for oneself.
It wasn’t difficult to obtain merino wool, but shearing was another matter. Out of necessity, she resorted to using Knockout Drug to sedate the sheep before shearing them with scissors close to their bodies. When they woke up, they probably wouldn’t even recognize themselves, bare and pitiable, haha~
After obtaining the wool, the first step was to wash it, and fortunately, the island was very clean, so the wool was much whiter than she had anticipated. fr.e ewe.bno.vel .com
For the first wash, she soaked it in laundry detergent, in case there were any bugs that needed to be killed immediately.
For the second wash, she scrubbed it with soap. Since it was for personal use, there was no need to be too particular.
After two washes, the next issue was dyeing.
Black could be dyed with cuttlefish ink, bluegrass could dye indigo, madder could dye a pale yellow (adding alum would turn it red), red flowers could dye scarlet, gardenia could dye tender yellow (Korean yellow radish is pickled with gardenia), and spinach could dye green color, and so on.
Spinning wheels already existed in ancient times, but when she arrived here, she had not prepared one, so after soaking the wool in dye and drying it, it was set aside. She could wait for Yan Qing to get her a spinning wheel before using it.
Just dealing with the wool kept her busy for nearly two months, and after those two months, green vegetables and green beans had all started to grow in the ground.
Corn grew even faster and was ready to eat. Every morning, they could boil three ears of corn, with each person holding one and gnawing on it.
Sometimes, when she didn’t feel like drinking sheep milk, she would filter some soy milk with graphite, add a little brine to make tofu pudding, and pour some brine sauce over it to drink. Official source is novelꜰire.net
In any case, since everything had to be made from scratch, the food was pure, natural, and unpolluted, making it incredibly tasty.
After summer came, worried that the flour at home would be infested by insects, she kneaded the flour and then made handmade noodles herself.
The handmade noodles she made were hollow, giving them a chewier texture than those made by machines, and she could also control the thickness herself.
Making handmade noodles was not easy, but Xiao Yu was strong, and with Yaya and Aya cooperating with her, the three of them worked together and completed the task impressively well.
There was also quite a lot of cornmeal at home. Xiao Yu took out most of it and stored it in space, leaving the rest in a jar to eat slowly. The two girls didn’t cook, so they usually didn’t notice these things.
Every morning before dawn, all of them would rise, Aya unshakably went to the seaside to practice martial arts and hunt for food ingredients (she also brought back seafood), Yaya went to the shore to look for seafood according to the hour, chasing the tide when possible, or checking their fish cages on the beach for luck. Besides cooking, Xiao Yu tended to the crops in the yard, fed the chickens and sheep, and with the remaining time, she would go out to forage for wild vegetables. There were wild vegetables all over the mountains, so many it felt like they could never be all picked...