While on the path of trees helpfully labelled in Botanic Park… I bring you E Calycogona Calycogona. It is native to Western Australia. Here it is flowering generously in early June in Adelaide.
And what a result in the dye bath! Every fallen bud cap printed.
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Leaf prints
My plant-knowledgeable and extremely generous Katoomba friends harvested some Indigofera Australis for me recently, and I brought it home gleefully to experiment. They have regular access to a place where Indigofera Australis is growing plentifully and where it is native. I had one previous opportunity to try dyeing with this plant and it was fascinating but completely unsuccessful. So, it was exciting to have another chance. There were 112g leaves in my parcel once I stripped them from their branches. They had been kept cool or refrigerated in the 7-10 days since they had been picked–fresh but not really fresh. I decided to try two different methods.
The first is a cold process suitable for protein fibres only, using vinegar. I have found it described online as a way to process Japanese Indigo to achieve turquoise by Dorothea Fischer and in a booklet by Helen Melville. Japanese Indigo is a prohibited import and not available in Australia (no matter my feelings on the subject of Japanese Indigo as a dyestuff, this country does not need more weeds). It does seem logical that this method should work on other indigo bearing species, even if Austral Indigo bears a lower proportion of indigo! However, using the leaves fresh is a key element and my leaves weren’t as fresh as possible.
Since my last effort, my Dad bought me a cheap secondhand blender (which I planned to use for papermaking). It made pulping the leaves so easy I didn’t even try cutting them up manually…
The water immediately went a vivid green, and so did the froth on top.
I began with a sample card and a small quantity of silk thread, and gave them a few dips before bed time, then left them in overnight and re-dipped in the morning. Here they are before being further re-dipped, with every fibre on my test card except cotton one shade of turquoise or another:
I also tried dyeing some wool, but even after a lot of dips my little skein is barely blue. End yield: 2 lengths of blue silk thread, three lengths of grey-green-blue silk thread and some off-white-in-the-direction-of-blue-merino. Clearly, as I had heard, Indigofera Australis is a low yielding source of indigo. But this method was brilliantly simple, easy and non toxic. I will happily try it again when my plants are a little bigger.
Filed under Dye Plants, Natural dyeing
These trees were rather young and rather prostrate. However, the fact that they were helpfully labelled made me feel I should take an interest!
I took only a few leaves, which is one of the big advantages of the eco-print technique of assessing dye potential, as India Flint has emphasised.
The grooves on the bud caps are rather lovely, I think. The sample print… not deeply exciting, even with some help from iron!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Leaf prints
Kurrajong trees (Brachychiton spp) are in fruit in the parklands and suburbs. They are native to Australia, but not my part of it.
The seeds are edible when roasted, but the fact that they come nestled into their little boat-shaped pods in a bed of irritating hairs puts a lot of people off (I’m one of those people)!
We went for a run by Victoria Park Racecourse a few weeks back, and there were many. Some with glorious lichen-covered trunks.
And evidence that it is not on the verge of becoming a world-renowned dye plant. In this image you can see my test piece, with half the leaves removed from it. The smudges of colour you see have transferred through from other samples in the same bundle. Nothing from the kurrajong leaves my beady eye could detect.
Filed under Dye Plants, Leaf prints
I finally found E Nicholii, growing in Botanic Park. My beady eyes have been searching the suburbs of my city for this tree as I ride past, to no avail until now.
This is such a finely-leaved tree! Perhaps I have failed to identify it if I have seen one fully grown, mistaking it for another kind of tree altogether. I had one growing in a pot but it suffered too much through summer. It is also the only tree I have ever seen as the subject of a public notice at Guild, where I once saw a hand lettered note asking if anyone could supply E Nicholii leaves for a dyer. My friend’s godmother–another dyer–who lives in NSW, recommended E Nicholii as her favourite dye plant. These are some of the reasons I was trying to grow it in a pot. I have given that up and we have a tiny specimen growing in the corner of the back yard. And now–the reason why people are so keen! I think this print is sensational.
See that big black splodge? I have wondered why I get one of these once in a while (and needless to say I have had a few theories). Just recently the penny dropped. Or should I say, the washer dropped–because that is what actually happened. One of my dye pots has a glass lid with a knob screwed into the centre of it. All these eucalypt dye baths have eaten away at the metal of the screw and washers. One washer recently fell off altogether, as the hole in it simply had been made too large for it to stay in position. So… there has been an inadvertent contribution of iron to some of my dye baths, and some unintended black smudges where iron water drips down onto my bundles from above–since this lid is convex, I have preferred it when I have large bundles in the pot. Aha! Another mystery solved. This may explain some of my surprise dye bath outcomes, too…
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Leaf prints
Podocarpus elatus is fruiting in Botanic Park. I rode past recently with my beady eyes alert, looking for this tree. I’ve investigated its qualities previously and discovered the fruit is edible. And today, there they were, lying on the ground in plenty. They offer plenty of weirdness by regular fruit standards, since the seed is outside the fruit. One of the less common forms of fruit in my limited experience! Here they are on the tree…
And on the ground below.
This is the tree itself. It is native to Australia, but it is a rainforest tree. For those who don’t know… I am not living anywhere near a rainforest. South Australia is generously described as having a Mediterranean climate. Those less generous just call it a desert, and a fair amount of the state answers that description.
I tried eating one of the fruits and it was just as I remembered it from last time: subtle is the most I could say about the flavour, and the word ‘mucilaginous’ came to mind immediately. If there is a commercial application for this fruit perhaps it would be… lubricant. Or perhaps it could be the gumbo of Australian bush food desserts. I tried leaf prints… but nothing too exciting came of it.
I twisted the seeds off the fruit and soaked the fruit overnight–pitting plums has never been so simple. No change in the colour of the water. I cooked them for almost an hour–water a deep plum colour by now–and then threw in a sample card and some silk thread. Soon after that, the alum mordanted wool looked almost blue, and the other fibres (cotton, silk, wool) looked pink. After about an hour of heat, the alum mordanted wool was deep grey-blue, the wool was deep rose-pink and the other fibres looked paler shades of pink.
Needless to say, this outcome made me think I should go back to that tree 🙂
Filed under Dye Plants, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing
I have seen this Eucalypt before, and dyed with it before. At most, I have had apricot on silk from the leaves.
Sadly, I can tell when I am looking at the same species (I think) but have not been able to identify the species. If any reader knows the species, I’d be glad of your advice. The bark is a lovely rough tan.
Then I found this one in full bud and beginning to flower, in early June.
I decided to try again and got the same result: the leaves barely make a mark, but oh my! The buds!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Leaf prints
On the first day of the new year, I started up a fermentation indigo vat, following Rebecca Burgess’ recipe in Harvesting Color. I’d had the ingredients waiting for some time but finally decided to gather my courage and give it a try. I have previously used the hydrosulphite vat with success, but this was my first time trying a fermentation method. I thought setting this vat up in the heat of an Australian summer was a good application of the principle that you should do those processes which work with the seasons and not against them.
We had a heat wave in January where the temperature went up to 45C during the day, but it was blessedly cooler at night. I stirred every day. No sign of a coppery sheen. In February, we had another hot spell where the temperature went up to 38C during the day and stayed well above 20C at night. I wondered if that was a coppery sheen, or my imagination. On the days I noticed it, I was too busy to try dyeing.
Well. Here it is, May and the vat never became active in summer and won’t now that winter is on its way. So the other week my friend wanted to indigo dye a birthday surprise item, and what with the need for it to be a surprise, the difficulty of laying in hydrosulphite and the volume of other things to do, by the time we got the vat happening, it was after dark. What I am saying is, these pictures are not great!
We used about half of my fermentation dye bath and added hydrosulphite. With the help of a nice woollen blanket (sold to me as a dog blanket due to what must have been a vey sad felting episode in its previous home) for insulation, and of course big red protective gloves… we got started and had that indigo magic in spite of the months the vat has lain untended. In goes the white fabric…
Exposure to the air on the clothesline
After a good rinse!
Next summer, I can see I’ll have to do better to get fermentation happening. Better focus, more effort at maintaining temperature, and perhaps some feeding and maintenance.
For those who have been worried, our caterpillars have apparently changed into moths and moved on, and the madder is recovering.
Filed under Dye Plants, Natural dyeing
I leaf printed a cotton t shirt on 10 February 2013. I prepared the fabric with soymilk and dyed using iron and E Scoparia leaves.
Here it is on my office desk after its first trip through the washing machine at 30C and its first trip to my office on my back as I rode to work. The front and the back (with the part that was outermost in the dye bath at the upper mid back):
It still smells strongly of eucalyptus when you’re up close (and sweaty), but the smell of soybean is almost gone, or overwhelmed by eucalyptus. I am thinking I can take a photo of it in the (relatively) controlled light conditions of my office at regular intervals and see what we can notice. One wash more and the smell of eucalyptus was fading a good deal.
Here it is in May, 12-15 washes later:
I am just not sure about the influence of light on this image… to me as the person wearing the garment, it seems to have changed little except that the part on the upper mid back where the fabric was exposed to the dye bath (and consequently, to iron) is much lighter. There’s no doubt the photo looks much less orange, though the leaf prints are still entirely distinct.
Filed under Eucalypts, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing
I have continued my experiments with Rebecca Burgess‘ ‘fall dye starter’ from Harvesting Color. I admit, it is barely autumn here and I’ve actually been trying this out through our summer… but this is a mere detail, I hope! I tried these three lobed leaves which someone told me were from a maple (I know little about maples), and birch leaves–why not?
I like the results a lot, but I won’t bother with birch again. I also collected oak leaves and wrapped them.
Finally, I made a special trip to what I was confident was a maple to collect these exquisite five-lobed leaves. I tried these on fabric cooked with tannin-bearing eucalyptus bark, which is not what Burgess recommends at all.
This produced hardly a smudge. So, I may have to review my ideas about tannin. Or on the other hand, I may have to reconsider my naive ideas about maples!
Filed under Dye Plants, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing
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