November 12, 2014 · 6:27 pm

The quest for Eucalyptus Polyanthemos continues

One weekend recently, I went to Norwood.  Well, really, I was deposited in this well heeled inner Eastern  suburb while my beloved went on a mission further from home, with a plan for collecting me on her way back.  The idea was that I would look for a birthday present for my Mum.  I had a few other goals in mind that involved the very nice bookshop there and a bit of random wandering.

2014-11-01 14.53.35

At some stage I decided a gelati would be perfect, as you do, given the chance.  So, gelati in hand, I wandered away from the main road and down a side street to see what I could see.  There on a bank sloping down to an unlovely carpark were some glorious sheoaks and some not-so-common eucalypts.  To me they seemed like plausible instances of E Polyanthemos, but the tallest I had ever seen.

2014-11-01 14.54.29

The evidence there had been many-anthers was all over the ground.  I think my eyes were caught by the fluttering of somewhat oval leaves in the breeze.

2014-11-01 14.53.42

Before long I was climbing the bank and dodging the cars.  Some of the trees had been cut and had re-sprouted with juvenile leaves that were almost round, and quite large.  My manual (Holliday and Watton’s Gardener’s Companion to Eucalypts) says ‘The juvenile leaves are blue and almost circular, the apex notched.’  Round, yes.  Blue, yes.  Notched?

2014-11-01 14.55.02

One thing led to another, as it so often does (well, in my case)… so I picked a small sample and tucked it in my bag.

2014-11-01 15.45.36

After a long walk and as much shopping as I could take, I sat myself down at a bus stop and waited for the return of my beloved.

2014-11-01 15.47.51

This morning I unwrapped the resulting bundle… very pleasing.

IMAG1394

 

And another from the same pot… which is a little greener than the picture suggests…

IMAG1396

And now for today’s completely gratuitous flower picture. This poppy is a completely different colour from any of its predecessors.  You have to love nature, and the frolicsomeness of bees rolling around in pollen…

IMAG1388

9 Comments

Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing

Tagged as , ,

November 7, 2014 · 3:56 pm

Knitting achievement

There has been some long awaited knitting achievement in this household recently. My skills with a camera don’t show it off to best effect, but this photo gives the best sense of the colours involved.

2014-11-02 18.03.01

This is Color Affection by Veera Valimaki, for those who don’t inhabit Ravelry… this pattern has been knit a lot of times!  When I took it to the local knitting group, its name was called aloud by each new person arriving, and it was also recognised at the Guild last night.  It is a simultaneously very clever pattern and straightforward to knit.  When I was sick, I spent hours garter stitching back and forth with a stop to think things over only at the end of each (ever lengthening) row.

2014-11-02 18.04.24

Years ago, beloved friends in Denmark gave me four skeins of 4 ply (fingering weight) yarn–the other one is yellow.  They were so beautiful.  Apparently the wool is handspun, (by a very skilled spinner), and perhaps naturally dyed, my friends didn’t know. It isn’t soft, in fact it is a little on the coarse side, certainly not for next to the skin.  I have admired these skeins very much over the years I have had them, waiting for my skills and confidence to be up to putting them to good use.

2014-11-02 18.04.12

I think my friends had in mind a cardigan of the style very much in favour in Denmark–and very beautiful–colourwork with a steeked front and pewter clasps.  I still couldn’t do it now, though I was touched by their confidence in my knitting skill!  When I received this gift the thought of knitting something so large with such fine yarn, in colourwork, without a pattern and with no certainty I had enough wool… I was profoundly intimidated at the prospect!  Anyway, finally one day it came to me–and over a year later, here is the shawl.  I’m delighted with it.  Perhaps I’ll knit another!

2014-11-06 08.20.36

In the garden, we are bracing for the scorching heat to come.  Australian summers are long and very hot in this part of the country, and likely to become more so as inaction on climate change continues, especially in our beloved continent.  However, right now there is a lot of flowering, seeding and harvest going on.  It’s the blessed moment before you start to wonder if anything will make it through summer!  The rhubarb is massive and I decided it needed fewer leaves to get through tomorrow’s predicted 37C heat.  Perhaps I need more rhubarb in my diet, too.  That could only be wonderful!  The beetroot are in the oven roasting for a salad with a yoghurt dressing.I suspect the carrots will be bitter, but they will find a place on the menu too.

2014-11-06 08.20.59

The poppies go on and on.  It’s wonderful to be out in the garden before breakfast (I put more seeds in this morning) and hear the bees busy in the flowers.  This poppy was the most exciting to the bees this morning…

6 Comments

Filed under Knitting, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as , , ,

November 5, 2014 · 12:14 pm

Solace

India Flint posted some time ago about a new project of hers called Solace.  It speaks to lots of issues I think about a good deal.  Holding tough issues like climate change in my mind a lot, I found the concept of solace as a companion on that path a piece of genius.  She has asked for participants to make flags that could form part of an installation: ‘a collective impromptu poem, recorded on cloth, to sing in the winds’.  I love this idea too.  I pitched it to a group of friends who meet to figure out what we might be able to do about climate change.  We were thinking about despair and discouragement and how to respond to these things, and Solace seemed like one way to me.

2014-10-24 16.51.07

I packed my threads and other necessaries (and dinner…).  The core concept is to create a triangular flag (pennon) with a word or words stitched on it–so we needed thread and cloth.

2014-10-24 16.43.22

I also packed fabrics to share around… this one is a print of an extremely fine-leaved native she-oak… and sadly I wrote its name down in a very special secret place I cannot find now…

2014-10-24 16.43.42

This print resulted from a tip India gave me at her workshop.  It was so exciting when I unwrapped this bundle it is hard to believe months have passed without my having another attempt at that glorious green!  My dear friend took this piece of fabric home with some marigold-dyed thread for him to finish later.  There are some others in development too…

2014-10-25 19.17.22

This one is a print from a friend’s pecan leaves.  India proposes: ‘Stitch on it a word or a phrase or a sentence that might act as a wish for peace or an acknowledgement of beauty, imply a sense of stillness or simply something that  gives you solace. It can be as brief or as long as you like. A haiku, a snatch of song, a word that takes you where you want to be.’

2014-11-02 09.25.22

Now for the confession.  I can’t quite believe that I managed to take my eye off the rather simple instructions and make these shapes and not triangular flags as requested. Do not follow my example in this respect!  I am not sure how I’ve become so forgetful, or so bad at following instructions!

2014-11-02 09.25.29

I will either have to make some more–which I might do anyway for sheer pleasure and participation’s sake–and keep these ones at home–or just send these and hope that they will be OK in a crowd of triangles.  Perhaps with some triangular pennons for company.

2014-11-02 09.25.00

So… there is my start on joining in Solace for now. Anyone else participating?

2014-11-02 09.25.11

21 Comments

Filed under Craftivism, Leaf prints, Sewing

Tagged as , ,

October 29, 2014 · 5:30 pm

Free at last!

So many moths!  I spent time at wormspit and learned this one is female, with yellow eggs visible through her skin.

image

They just kept emerging!

image

Many, many moths.

image

Last night the four friends at our house considered whether the silk moths should stay indoors or be released in the garden, where they can have sunlight, air and plants but may become someone else’s dinner.

image

The garden won. For the rest of their short lives, when they will not even eat… They will be in the garden.

image

We sat awhile appreciating their beauty and fragility.

image

9 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as

October 26, 2014 · 1:20 pm

Alyogyne Huegelii

Alyogne Huegelii is a spectacular flowering shrub that is native to Western Australia.  It is drought hardy but blooms profusely, and this very much explains its popularity in gardens here in Adelaide.  There are a couple of these shrubs flowering spectacularly in my neighbourhood at the moment.

2014-10-19 19.21.35

One of the things I really like about natural dyeing is the fact that you can enjoy flowers, gather them as they fall or pass their best, and have the joy of the flower as well as your dyepot.  So I have been stopping by to collect fallen flowers from the footpath and the gutter, and pulling withered blooms that will not re-open.

2014-10-19 19.21.16

I crammed the dried petals into my jar along with some vinegar, foil, water and a woolen sample card.  For those who are not familiar, this is India Flint’s Stuff, Steep and Store process.  I have no idea if these flowers will yield dye–they are from the same plant family as hibiscus (and hibiscus petal yield dye)–so they do seem promising–but they are free and readily available and there is nothing but time to be lost by trying them out.  I might learn something!

2014-10-18 09.19.51

After cooking, I had a deep purple dyebath in my jar.  So I gave it a label, added it to my collection, and now we wait.  It belatedly occurred to me to check my reference books.  The Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria’s Dyemaking with Australian Flora (1974) reports that they achieved pink-fawn using cream of tartar as a mordant (I haven’t heard of cream of tartar being used without alum, so I have learned something already).  They also achieved green and pale lemon with chrome, which I am not prepared to use.  My sample card has alum-mordanted and rhubarb-leaf mordanted sample yarns, as well as an unmordanted sample–and the jar contains aluminium foil.  Joyce Lloyd and India Flint’s books are silent on the matter.  So–we’ll just have to see what happens.

2014-10-19 13.39.32

I later decided on an alkaline jar, since hibiscus dyes are ph sensitive, and created another.  It leaked green liquid when I heated it, but the jar as a whole doesn’t look green (yet).

2014-10-24 15.41.50

 

Oh.  And, we have moths.

2014-10-25 13.46.05

 

8 Comments

Filed under Dye Plants, Natural dyeing

Tagged as , , , ,

October 23, 2014 · 9:05 am

Week 8 Silkworm update

It has been a week of illness in our household, so this is a late update.  As I write this morning, there is just one silkworm left munching.  The rest are safely cocooned or in the process of creating cocoons.  On Tuesday, there were only a few more.  Mercifully, a friend at the Guild gave me a bag of mulberry leaves last week–bless her generous heart.

2014-10-21 08.10.56

I can confirm that I don’t know why some cocoons are golden yellow and some are cool white.  I marked their tubes as they went in during the last week, and there is no obvious relationship between the cream silkworms on the one hand and the stripy ones on the other–and cocoon colour.

2014-10-20 08.56.44

Meanwhile, the garden is a riot of green vegetables and herbs running to seed (chicory, lettuce, kale, dill and parsley)  and flowers.  There are at least three varieties of poppy blooming, and bees rolling around gleefully in the bowl of the larger flowers. 2014-10-20 08.54.46

 

The pelargonium is even more glorious than last year, too and some of the iris tubers I bought at the Guild turn out to be deep purple (I thought they were all yellow)… so my thoughts are turning to more preservation dyeing.  Petal collecting has commenced!

2014-10-19 13.39.42

2 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation

Tagged as , ,

October 15, 2014 · 4:22 pm

Quilt border dyeing

2014-10-04 18.05.19

I came into a lot of fabric and various other items from a friend’s mother a while back, as some of you might remember.  Most of it I found happy homes for among friends and their connections, and through the Guild.  However, I did keep all the calico and other forms of plain, undyed natural fibre fabrics.  There was cotton sheeting, parts of calico sacks, pieces of cotton fabric from which some item or other had been cut, and some small pieces of linen that  might have been intended for embroidery.  There was one piece of raw silk, too, I  believe.  The cottons joined the other fabrics that have been queued up for the soybean bath.

IMAG0955

I have also been re-mordanting fabrics that didn’t turn out as I had hoped, and some that I mordanted with tannin to no especially good effect in the past. Here is one such piece of cloth before dyepot.

2014-10-04 13.47.21

I kept remembering India Flint’s wonderful statement at the workshop I went to.  Perhaps I am quoting freely, but it went something like : ‘Everything will be beautiful when it’s finished. And if it isn’t beautiful, it isn’t finished.’  So all manner of things hit the bucket, and then the dye pot.  Others are still waiting.

2014-10-04 13.59.55

I think these fabrics will make a good quilt border, and hopefully I now have enough to get all the way around my quilt.

2014-10-04 18.08.59

Even the over-dyed or previously tannin-mordanted fabrics came out more interesting than they went in.  I think they will make good binding for the quilt.  They should tone in nicely but offer some contrast.  Recent measurements indicate that I have more than enough so…. no excuses, it must be time to assemble this thing!

2014-10-04 18.08.49

3 Comments

Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing

Tagged as , , ,

October 13, 2014 · 4:24 pm

Week 7 silkworm update

Oh. My. Goodness.  Pampering these no-longer-so-little pets multiple times a day as they munch through their leaves is a little on the dull side 7 weeks in.

2014-10-13 13.30.25

Happily, there are less mouths to feed every day now. The picture above shows all remaining silkworms.

2014-10-13 13.30.40

The big ones are seriously big! Some are still creating their cocoons.  It is fascinating watching them start from the outside and gradually vanish into a home of their own making.

2014-10-13 13.33.45

Some have finished the job and the cocoons are the same mix of yellow and white as last year for no discernible reason.

2014-10-13 13.34.32

And… there are quite a few!

2014-10-13 13.34.14

7 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation

Tagged as

October 12, 2014 · 4:47 pm

Ply time!

A while back I had used almost every bobbin I own, each with a different colour of thread on it.

IMAG0963

Over time there were even more bobbins of singles than this pictures shows…  finally there has been a season of plying, skeining and washing, and now I have this pile instead.

2014-10-12 14.26.11

Logwood purples, purple-greys and purple-browns, a cochineal pink (and a cochineal-logwood exhaust), three indigo blues, two madder exhaust-oranges, and a coreopsis exhaust yellow.  I didn’t take good enough notes of the fibres–some are on merino roving (the madder), some on polwarth, some on grey corriedale. Maybe there is a little of Malcolm the Corriedale in there too!

2014-10-09 17.30.19

And there has been even more bee swarm action in the neighbourhood.  These bees have taken up residence on a rainwater tank, with some support from a ladder! And… I am so over tending the silkworms 🙂

8 Comments

Filed under Natural dyeing, Spinning

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 9, 2014 · 10:00 am

A little light neighbourhood commentary, and more bees

Since I’ve been a dog aunty, I’ve been walking the neighbourhood even more than usual. It has given me lots of opportunities to see the local bird boxes in use. That is a rainbow lorikeet sitting on top of the box.

2014-10-07 18.30.37

And this, I believe, is the lorikeet wondering what I am up to down there.  Or perhaps the lorikeet is watching the dog!

2014-10-07 18.30.44

This morning, I went to check on a swarm at our friends’ house, and to look in on their chooks.  There have been three swarms in their neighbourhood in addition to those at our house over the last couple of weeks, so our friend the beekeeper has been a regular visitor.  Passing through the same park on the way home… I was admiring the activity of the bees who have moved into a big river red gum (E Camaldulensis) that leans to one side near the creek.  I don’t know if you can see them in this picture–but this is the entry to their home, viewed from below.  In the past I have seen musk lorikeets wing their way out of the same hollow.

2014-10-09 08.29.48

This is one of the trees I tied a handmade banner to a while ago.  You can see it here, dwarfed by the immensity of the tree.

2014-10-09 08.30.00

When I got closer, I realised that someone had added their own commentary to the banner.  In a good way!

2014-10-09 08.29.37

6 Comments

Filed under Craftivism, Eucalypts, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as ,