Tag Archives: dinner

September 30, 2014 · 6:02 pm

Week 5 silkworm update with bees

It has been a big week for the silkworms. The stage of audible munching has been reached. I come out in the morning and there is just about no leaf left. I now have 3 trays of silkworms.

Minutes after I add more leaves, holes appear and heads poke through them. keeping up the supply is a big job.

Meanwhile, the critter action in our backyard ramped up to a swarm of bees, hanging from a metal arch with a rose bush on it.

I found a friendly beekeeper who agreed to come and collect them. I didn’t realise I would be a participant. He took pity on me and lent me a cover for my head and face and upper body. He was wearing shorts and a t shirt! I shook the archway and he held up a box and caught the swarm as it dropped in.

They seem to have settled in. Here they are heading in and out in the morning sun.

The beekeeper noticed a second swarm in next door’s tree. We hoped they might be two parts of the same swarm, but apparently not. That koala shaped blob silhouetted against the sky is a mass of bees to high to reach. They might be with us for some time to come.

Meanwhile in backyard news, the biggest carrot ever grown at our place. I guess I still think of myself as someone who does not grow carrots, and forgot to check on them.

And the leeks and rhubarb are in. Rhubarb with ginger and vanilla and orange this week. Mmmm.

6 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as agonis flexuosa, bees, dinner, silkworms

September 8, 2014 · 4:41 pm

An invitation, a week 2 silkworm update and some random happenings

Let me begin with some dignity, because it won’t last. Soon we’ll be back to silkworms and other silly stuff. Anne Harris of Annie’s Workroom would like to invite you to her exhibition. It’s in Brisbane, Queensland–I am sorry to report this means I won’t be able to see it.

Expressions of Love: Lovingly Interrupted brings together established contemporary artist Kim Schoenberger’s collection of treasured memories assembled from the humble teabag. And introduces emerging artist Anne Harris’s work of naturally dyed, painted and stitched images exploring the emotions of love. Official Opening 14th September 3.30pm. Closes 28th September: Gallery 159, 159 Payne Road, The Gap, Brisbane. There is a special bus to make it easy for sunshine coast people to attend. Please call Anne 0433 162 847 for more information or visit her on the web.

And now… for the silkworm update of the week. OMG, as they say in the classics, the silkworms are still hatching! I have been struggling to figure out a cross-national item to give a sense of scale (US coins don’t work for me). Here is my trial object. Let me know how I’m doing!

Here is a close up of silk worms in several stages of growth–with more hatching every single day two weeks after they started! They were all laid as eggs within a couple of days of one another, I hasten to add. What more can I say? There is still just one mulberry tree with leaves on it in the neighbourhood.

On the weekend, there was lemon preserving (the salty kind)… inspired in part by an anonymous donation of a bag of Meyer lemons left on our porch. Three cheers for the grower and the tree!

I had the urge to cast on, a lot.

I also had the urge to dye and since it was warm and sunny, took advantage by mordanting fabric for future leaf prints. I had the realisation some time ago that I had somehow managed not to find a section on mordanting cellulose fabrics, with quite specific instructions, in Eco-Colour. I had always wished there was a section like that in there. Happily India Flint has indeed put it in her gorgeous book and if only I had paid more attention… Anyway, since I can’t change the past, I have been waiting for sunny weather to dip and dry and dip and dry on a principle somewhat different to the one I have been experimenting with–and now the sunshine is here I got to it! Good dyeing times are coming…

12 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation, Knitting, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as corriedale, dinner, friendship is the best form of wealth, gifts, India Flint, mordanting, silk, silk worms, wool, yarn

April 20, 2014 · 10:04 am

Rhubarb leaf and alum mordants, hot and cold processes

Way back in December I was thinking about hot and cold mordanting processes. I decided on an experiment inspired by a post by Leena at Riihivilla which led in turn to a blog called From Silk Road. There, Jarek shows experiments with solar mordanting over 28 days, and one of the mordants he is using is Himalayan Rhubarb. Mine is the good old fashioned European eating kind… but perhaps the same principles could be applied? Jenny Dean certainly describes cold mordanting with alum and I have tried that previously with success. I was also curious about the findings of Pia at Colour Cottage. She has undertaken some experiments with rhubarb leaf mordant here and here and found it made no difference to dye uptake or lightfastness. So disappointing!

I started with 1100g rhubarb leaves (and stewed the rhubarb with orange juice to go with waffles… mmmm). Way more rhubarb leaf than necessary for the job, I think. I have no way to know if I am even using the same rhubarb as Pia… but I decided to err on the side of plenty of rhubarb leaf and not committing a huge quantity of yarn. I created two, 25g skeins of Bendigo Woolllen Mills alpaca rich ‘magnolia’, left over from some past workshop I ran. One was subjected to the classic heat treatment in rhubarb leaf solution (45 minutes on a bare simmer), left overnight to cool down and rinsed out.

The other went into a glass jar for a solar treatment, which was quite hot at times. It went into the jar on 16 December and our first 40C day of the year was scheduled for the 18th. I created two more skeins and mordanted them in alum, one using the hot process and the other packed into a bucket with a lid in the sun. Here is the solar mordant rhubarb jar (and some iron soaking in vinegar water on the left), in December. They’re sitting on a concrete surface with a concrete wall behind them. I’m trying for thermal mass in a sunny spot.

Things being what they are (by which I mean I have been too busy to think much about this experiment), I took the yarn out on 13 April 2014. Here it is before removal. There was a little layer of mould stuck to the lid, for those who are wondering. In retrospect, this would have been a great application for Stuff Steep and Store.

Here is the yarn after removal from the rhubarb leaf solution. I’d call that a dye and not only a mordant!

IMAG4573

Here is my solar process alum-mordanted yarn after similar neglect for the same period of time.

IMAG4572

Finally: my full selection dry and ready for use: no mordant, alum applied with heat, alum applied through solar process, rhubarb leaf applied with heat, rhubarb leaf applied through a solar process.

2 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation, Natural dyeing

Tagged as alpaca, dinner, mordanting, mordants, not tan again!, rhubarb, wool, yarn

January 29, 2014 · 8:51 pm

Harvesting the finger limes… with recipes!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programme of fibre related crafts and natural dyeing for a dessert special. Not interested? You are, of course, allowed to leave the kitchen and I hope to see you back soon!

We have a little finger lime tree (Citrus australasica syn. Microcitrus australasica). This is a native plant but it certainly isn’t native to any place near me: it’s a tropical plant. A friend was growing it in a pot in a seaside location that is windy and cold in winter and it was judged to need rescue by her horticulturally knowledgeable friends, who proposed me as a suitable new host. Colour me flattered by this! We’ve struggled to find it a spot in which it can manage through winter, and this year it behaved less like a deciduous plant through the colder months and we have had a bumper harvest.

We have dozens of fruit this year instead of the three or four of the last two years. In the past, we would share the small harvest in a single special dish with the tree’s previous host.

There aren’t a lot of cookbooks with recipes for finger lime on my shelf, so I made some up. We had ten people for dinner and a very interesting and complex conversation one night and these dishes were so well reviewed I decided to share despite the absence of wool or eucalyptus. If you have traumatic English boarding school memories of sago (tapioca), avert your eyes now! If, on the other hand, you love bubble tea, I am cooking with the baby sister of those bubbles. These dishes are gluten and dairy free and vegan as well as delicious….

Finger lime sago jelly for 10

Cook 1 cup of sago (seed tapioca, tapioca pearls) in 5 cups of water with 3-4 cardamom pods (to be removed when the cooking part is over). Cook until the sago is clear. I prefer to do this by bringing to a boil, stirring vigorously while the heat is on, then turning off the heat and putting the lid on for about 10 minutes. Repeat 3-4 times. The sago will absorb a lot of liquid this way with little energy being used and little attention from you. Then, add the zest and flesh of 8-10 finger limes, juice of 2 lemons, 1 cup of sugar, vanilla and some ground cardamom if you didn’t use the pods. Now is the time to take them out if you did use them. Cool, refrigerate.

The flesh of a finger lime is like a mass of tiny spheres of tangy, sour, almost resinous flavour. I cut the fruit lengthways in quarters to extract the contents with my fingers. Mixing this with sago is like having the textural experience of sago (which I find sublime) paired with tiny explosions of intense flavour.

Coconut custard for 10

Heat three 400 ml (13.5 fl oz) cans of light coconut milk–that makes a total of 1200ml (40.5 fl oz) coconut milk–in a saucepan. Reserve a little to use in the next step. In a separate bowl, blend the reserved coconut milk, 3 tablespoons of sugar (or stevia), 4 tablespoons of cornflour, ginger and vanilla until smooth. When the coconut milk is warm but not boiling, remove from the heat. Stirring vigorously, add the thickening mixture in a stream. When it is mixed in, return the saucepan to the heat and continue to heat, stirring constantly, until it begins to bubble. Cool. Serve with your finger lime sago jelly.

I hope some of you are lucky enough to be able to try finger limes!

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Filed under Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as dinner, finger lime, friendship is the best form of wealth

December 23, 2013 · 9:00 am

Dyeing experiment: Chicory ‘Red Dandelion’ root

I have seen quite a few claims that it is possible to get red dye from dandelion root in print. But not usually with any detailed instructions. In Craft of the Dyer Karen Casselman said she had tried numerous times without success to get red from dandelion root. She invited readers to write in if they knew how it could be done. I don’t know how it can be done. But when I started growing Chicory ‘Red Dandelion’ the stems and leaf ribs were such a vibrant deep red I promised myself I would try it out just in case.

Many a happy dinner has come from this plant! When I harvested the root the plants were huge, and full of blue flowers, and falling all over other vegetables, at more promising stages in their life cycles. Out came the chicory, destined to become chicken happiness. Here are the roots, just as unpromising looking as dandelion roots (in the matter of red dye at any rate).

Chopped and soaking:

After an hour of cooking:

Those roots had not released any colour at all. So–one more dead end in the mystery of red dye from dandelion roots… There is a dyer on Ravelry who says she has achieved red from a specific dandelion by a cold ammonia process… but her description is not like any dandelion I have seen here so far…

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Filed under Dye Plants, Natural dyeing

Tagged as dinner, neighbourhood dyeplants, user error

September 9, 2013 · 4:41 pm

Waste not, want not, with a side serving of the election

I live in a society so wealthy and so wasteful, in global context, that any selection of actions I make about waste reduction can feel a bit arbitrary. I see so many missed opportunities every day! But still the principle that waste should be avoided is beyond criticism, and the principle that I should do what I can, is likewise sound. So this election night, I took the eucalyptus-printed silk/hemp scraps from my previous foray into shirtmaking (I was piecing them together back in this post) and the scraps of my skirt adventure, and created bags from them. I love bags. I love making them, giving them and carrying them around. I seldom leave home with less than three, a curious fact I’ve decided to relax about.

Skirt bag 1: has already gone to an enthusiastic new owner who cooked a fabulous dinner for us last night:

Skirt bag 2 is with me now and soon to be introduced to someone I am confident will like it:

I decided to line the hemp/silk bags on account of the method of piecing I had chosen and being unsure of the fabric’s propensity to wear. I had leftover silk noil from various workshops and from making pillowcases. Apologies for the dodgy pictures taken after dark, indoors, with a flash. Some bloggers are so impatient!

There were some small sample pieces that had indigo australis and local eucalyptus leaves printed onto them and then an iron afterbath in the Blue Mountains. I took these pictures just before they vanished into the interior of the bags to be seen only by the new owners, whom I hope will enjoy having this treat inside their bags! I personally am the kind of person who revels in pocket linings made of treasured fabrics, whether they are organic flour bags or were formerly part of my late Grandmother’s extensive scarf collection. Needless to say, I love a bag lining with a story.

I like these bags a lot. The weight of the fabric with the lining works well, to my way of thinking. I could feel the urge to give these away before they were off the sewing machine, so here are pictures on an overcast morning!

This next one has been rated suitable as a gift for my mother-out-law, who is apparently generous enough in her assessment of my skills to talk to her friends about my crafting sometimes. She has friends who have been weavers and dyers for years. She herself has been a wonderful garment creator for decades and keeps thinking she has given it up and then changing her mind, so her judgment may not be unbiased but I am flattered by it nonetheless. Her bag has been finished with a strip from a heavy weight ramie shirt found at an op shop (thrift store)–beautiful fabric and sewing skill but an appalling garment I felt no compunction about cutting up and redeploying. Most of it became another bag complete with interior welt/flap pockets which had been a beautifully crafted feature of the front of the shirt. Sadly they were an offence against fashion even to me, and I don’t hold with fashion much!

And for gratuitous images, I have these of our hens. They don’t stand around waiting for their photos to be taken when there are earwigs to be found.

However, they are glorious, and they are also blissfully ignorant of the election that was taking place the day I snapped their pictures. We were planting and pruning and mowing and they were seeking insects and seeds.

I feel deeply sad that the people of my country have elected a government that thinks we need to pay less international aid to fund infrastructure here; that expresses routine contempt rather than compassion for refugees taking desperate measures to escape their mostly war torn homelands and get to our shores; that thinks roads are a higher priority than public transport; that cares little for renewable energy and plans to fund it less; and that has expressed little interest in participating in global efforts to halt or turn back environmental devastation or climate change. Here’s India Flint on the subject, should you wish for more. I haven’t made a habit of commenting on the state of our nation here, but I felt the need to mark the day. There will be some serious further consideration given to the forms of action that might be needed in the coming period at our house and in our community of friends. Thinking about the state of the world and our impact upon it, in all their complexity, will continue to be crucial.

11 Comments

Filed under Eucalypts, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing, Sewing

Tagged as brown, chicken happiness, cotton, dinner, E Cinerea, E Scoparia, eucalyptus, friendship is the best form of wealth, India Flint, Indigofera Australis, iron, politics, ramie, silk, think globally

September 2, 2013 · 1:51 pm

Nettle harvest

I decided to grow my nettles high and try processing them for fibre again this year. I have left this a little later than ideal, but so much about my knowledge of processing nettle fibre is imperfect I decided to just give it a try and worry about fine detail at some future point when I have more understanding and more experience! Here we have my harvest, with leaves:

And after the leaves have been stripped. The leaves went to friends who were enthusiastic about nettle soup. I am sorry to say I don’t like the flavour of nettles. I wish I did, they are full of minerals and I have plenty of them! I love the idea of eating them but not the reality. I will just have to stick to eating dandelion, prickly lettuce and milk thistle to keep my weeds down.

While I was pulling the nettles and weeding out the soursobs and burr medic and grass, the chickens kept me company and enjoyed the fruits (and earwigs) of my labours. If this was a podcast, I would have been only too delighted to record their excited voices. And when I found these, I had some excitement of my own! In fact, I went in and made a potato and silverbeet (and endive, milk thistle, chicory, parsley) soup to share with my friends the nettle lovers.

The nettles are much bigger than the previous harvest. So much so there was no chance I could rett them in a bucket, even my biggest one. In the end, they went into the wheelbarrow, the biggest receptacle I could find other than my bathtub! To be continued…

19 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation

Tagged as bast fibres, chicken happiness, dinner, nettle, potatoes

May 30, 2013 · 7:58 am

Eucalyptus Caesia

My parents came around one weekend as autumn was beginning and brought gifts from their garden: quince, guavas, mandarins, and these lovely flowers from their front yard. Eucalyptus Caesia ‘Silver Princess’.

It has been quite a season. We have made an incredible amount of pesto from our basil plants and had enough to share as well. The final pesto fest was last weekend, shared gleefully with a friend who is a wonderful cook. We also made a walnut and pomegranate molasses dip of wonder, a rice pudding flavoured with mastic and orange flower water and some fiendishly rich and delectable mastic and rosewater icecream. Finally, she read poetry. Exquisite!

Once the flowers wilted, into the pot the leaves went. Nothing too exciting came out, which has been my experience in the past. However, the lovely weeping habit, young white bark, minnirichi bark on the trunk (the bark peels in vertical strips in a rather amazing way) and the spectacular flowers… are probably enough delights for one plant to provide.

2 Comments

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

Tagged as dinner, E Caesia, eucalypts, eucalyptus, orange flower water, rosewater

April 19, 2013 · 3:03 pm

Preparing

It has been a time of preparation, lately. I’ve been on a fleece washing project. After months of thinking I should wash while it is still warm but feeling quite unable to begin, apparently the change in the weather (toward autumn) brought on the sense that fleece washing would be possible. I have washed all that remained of over 3 kg of grey corriedale and some white alpaca for good measure. My motley collection of drying apparatus have all been in use. I still have a lot of high-grease polwarth and a filthy corriedale to wash.

A bunch of friends got together to make passata and I was too sick to go and join in the fun. However, my partner went along and I put the results up in these jars preparing for the winter. The Fowlers Vacola outfit is steaming on the stove as I type.

Our freezer is full of pesto from all the basil of this summer.

I have some Lincoln locks sitting waiting for cold dyes to fix . And I had better get ready to use the drum carder!

3 Comments

Filed under Fibre preparation

Tagged as alpaca, basil, cold pad batch dyeing, dinner, for the love of the Guild, Lincoln, tomatoes, wool

Tag Archives: dinner

Week 5 silkworm update with bees

An invitation, a week 2 silkworm update and some random happenings

Rhubarb leaf and alum mordants, hot and cold processes

Harvesting the finger limes… with recipes!

Dyeing experiment: Chicory ‘Red Dandelion’ root

Waste not, want not, with a side serving of the election

Nettle harvest

Eucalyptus Caesia

Preparing

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