Tag Archives: E Scoparia

September 14, 2016 · 6:28 pm

Eucalyptus dyeing

In not-so-recent dye baths, I included a wool scarf for a friend.

IMAG2094

I love the way it turned out.  I hope she will too.  I bundled up E Scoparia leaves and some windfalls from a tree I think might be E Nicholii.  It branches (what I mean is it that it has been brutally pruned) very high so these windfalls gave me leaves to try that I otherwise could never reach.

IMAG2093

Love the string resist marks…

IMAG2091

Then I returned to the E Cladocalyx bark I harvested weeks back which has been steeping.

IMAG2089

Calico mordanted in soy and lots of clamping was the choice of the day.

IMAG2090

The wet fabric next day (I know, patience is the dyer’s friend, but my friend was out for the day).

2016-07-18 11.25.28

I do especially love the buds!

2016-07-18 11.25.18

The overall effect… suggesting my fold-and-clamp technique may require more practice!

2016-07-18 11.25.36

 

5 Comments

Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing

Tagged as , , , , ,

August 15, 2016 · 12:19 pm

Milky merino and eucalyptus turtleneck

I was so excited by my recent winter wardrobe success, that I decided to go again.  So I made another turtleneck using the same pattern from milky merino.  This time, I made it longer than required. I’ve had serious shrinkage with this fabric–whether it was my carelessness or the fabric is yet to be clarified. I expect it was my carelessness… This time I used a red zipper from the stash, which looked pretty amazing on the undyed item, but apparently I took no photos. And either I followed the instructions on the pattern (just for something completely different), or perhaps it was luck, but zipper insertion went smoothly.

2016-07-22 12.17.27

Then I decided to sort out one of my spencers (long sleeved underwear for warmth). It shrank in dyeing as well as being perhaps a little short to begin with. It rides up, the reverse of what clothing worn for warmth should do.  So I added some serious length to it.  I love the dyeing on this garment–details here.  But it just wasn’t working for its intended purpose.

2016-07-22 12.18.10

I went out for a walk and then bundled up.

2016-07-23 12.17.51

The bundles came out of the dye pot looking splendid.

2016-07-24 09.55.58

The spencer came out a very good length and is much more useable.  I did prefer the print before, but this one is pretty lovely too.

IMAG2222

Here is the new turtleneck.  I like it!  If anything it is a little loose.

IMAG2215

The red zipper works fine.

IMAG2221

E Scoparia is in bud, which also works well.

IMAG2216

I tried a different folding strategy.  I love the colour and pattern, less sure about the location.  And now I am happily wearing my new top for the rest of the cold weather.

IMAG2218

 

16 Comments

Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing

Tagged as , ,

July 21, 2016 · 4:56 pm

Train station plantings

I finally decided to plant out the Eucalyptus Scoparia I manged to grow from seed.  I have been planting out an area near the railway line for some time now and it has gone from bare and weedy to bushy and well covered. There is plenty of protection for a tiny tree now!

IMAG2032

I planted some more ground covers and was surprised to find that the seafoam statice that had been doing so well there had vanished, with some holes left behind.  I hope it has been dug out and replanted somewhere where it was wanted.

IMAG2034

The E Scoparia went in behind a bench where I’m hoping it will be safe to grow.

IMAG2033

Later in the day I headed over to a new place I have been thinking over.  It is a barren space adjoining the railway station in my neighbourhood, with an open drainage route running through it.  I have been wondering whether the rushes might grow in the drainage channel, which is quite mossy in places at this time of year. I thought I’d start with the sides of the space though.

IMAG2066

I took over some native pigface (Carprobutus glaucescens) which has grown readily from cuttings, some saltbush, a hop bush and a eucalypt (unknown species).

IMAG2065

In they went.  There was some soil here and a lot of sandy unpromising material as well.

IMAG2067

And, there was so much broken glass.  It looks to me as though someone/s must have had fun smashing bottles against the bridge walls here at some point.  So I collected all I could.

IMAG2068

I took my haul of rubbish home and tucked the rusty wire into my iron water jar for later use in dyeing.

IMG_20160716_193639

 

 

 

 

4 Comments

Filed under Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as , , , ,

July 19, 2016 · 4:30 pm

Winter wardrobe: from white to wow!

Before I went to Mansfield (… a year ago!) I cut out a long sleeved knit top.  The last one I made, a few years back, was nibbled by moths before I even sewed it together, so this one has been safely in a ziplock bag for its quiet year in pieces.IMAG2026

In the end, it took me only an evening to sew it together.  Why did I wait so long? Last time, I had a lot of trouble with this top and hand finished a lot of it, hand inserting the zipper and hand sewing the hems. I think I was a bit intimidated by the job, sorry to admit.  This time it all came together on the machine although the zipper is not lying terribly flat.

IMAG2029

Next morning, I was out in search of dye plants and visited one of my favourites (E Scoparia). The whole time I was collecting leaves I could hear clicking and popping sounds.  Eventually I realised there was a rosella (maybe more than one) very high up–more than 10 metres up) in the sugar gums on the other side of the street, nibbling on the gumnuts and then letting them fall onto the surface of the road (so that was beak clicking and the popping sound of gumnuts dropping on the hard surface)!

IMAG2038

There has been so much wind and rain I hardly needed to cut anything from this tree.  I have learned enough to be able to pick the leaves of this tree out from all the others in the gutter (which I could not always do dependably in the past–I have learned some things!)IMAG2039

Deciding how to fold and wrap is always intriguing…

IMAG2045

In the end I decided to dye a woven wool scarf at the same time. I spent time with a friend I don’t see very often recently and thought I might send her a gift. This will be part of it if it turns out well enough! I tucked some more leaves from my stash of dried leaves into the dye bath.

IMAG2048

I love the transformation… and wish I could be more patient…

IMAG2077

And I love the outcome!  Here is the front…

IMAG2082

Here is the back… (the zipper looks pallid now but it was what I had, recycled and saved).

IMAG2081

This has motivated me to make another, as my stock of winter warm work clothes is becoming pilled and threadbare, and I’ve had some lovely encouragement from friends lately.  Sometimes I think it is a shame I can’t get away with just wearing the same thing every day, as my tendency is clearly to make the same thing over and over again…

18 Comments

Filed under Eucalypts, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures, Sewing

Tagged as ,

June 16, 2016 · 4:46 pm

Dupion silk

Oh. My. Goodness.  Dupion silk isn’t really my cup of tea.  I made my beloved a beautiful shirt from it for a big event once, but my one venture into wearing it myself was a brightly striped waistcoat made from a minimum amount.  But recently I went to the Guild and there were leftover dupion lengths on the trading table.  I walked away with the palest pieces for $3.  They were a lot bigger than I expected but with some sun damage.  The Guild was full of cheery folk eating cake and chatting on and admiring all manner of knitting and felting and spinning exploits.  There were conversations about mordants in which I broke the news about how toxic many of them are and turned down offers to give me some toxic variations on the theme.  I explained about the toxic waste dump where my Guild has been disposing of such chemicals for years now. I accepted a gift of some alum and cochineal extract (the kind my mother used to use for icing).  Then there was quite a conversation about woad, cultivation and uses, which was good fun–and I gave the person concerned (who was new to the Guild) the alum!   Anyway… I rode away feeling all activated and cheerful, and on my way home picked up a bucket from a skip, and from there the world was my oyster. Here’s the bucket on the back of my bike.

IMAG1669

I rode through the lovely park lands and sampled all kinds of likely looking eucalypts as well as a sheoak. This one, with interesting bark and at least three different kinds of leaves.

IMAG1681

This one I think is E Platypus.  I have heard of others getting colour from it: me, not so much, so far.

IMAG1678

And some lovely silver-leaved varieties too.

IMAG1675

Finally I collected E Cladocalyx bark and filled my bucket to capacity.  Here is the tree up close-ish.

IMAG1689

Here it is from further away with the bike still there for size and a lot of the tree still not in the picture.

IMAG1690

As I rode along the corellas were out grazing on one of the playing fields in the parklands (they are the white spots on the grass), with the city centre sprouting up in the near distance.

IMAG1670

I arrived home and bundled up…

IMAG1697

So pretty!

IMAG1703

And then into the pot.

IMAG1715

The various eucalypt samples from the parklands gave little colour (left), but my dependable friend E Scoparia dyed the silks a treat (right).

IMAG1712

I soaked the bark and saved it for later. The prints are lovely and detailed…

IMAG1771

I put the not so successful silk in for another bundling…

IMAG1772

And remembered that my last experiments with clamping went better with less than maximum pressure… after the results were in!

IMAG1773

 

 

 

 

 

9 Comments

Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing

Tagged as , , , ,

March 19, 2016 · 11:50 am

Transformations: Table cloth to top #64

2015-11-23 17.53.36

Once upon a time there was a linen tablecloth.   It was a round table cloth with an overlocked edge, gifted to me by someone who no longer had a round table.

2015-11-23 17.52.20

It went into the dyepot one week, but since the dye pot is only so big, I tore it into strips and dyed it that way, mostly with E Scoparia, but also with cotinus (smokebush) leaves and flowering heads picked when they poked out through a fence near our food co-op.  I really could not believe the purple from the cotinus and I am not sure why it happened.  Needless to say, I will try that again and see if it repeats.  I did also try woad leaves but that was less spectacular.  Pinky but not very leaf printy.

2015-11-30 18.00.59

Some time last year I had a sudden whim to turn it into Merchant and Mills Top #64 and pieced parts together to make that happen, and cut it out.  Then after a while it was rolled up.  Then it was parked for some months.  Just recently I did some cleaning up and thought maybe I should finish some things. I just sewed a seam or two a day in a busy time.

2016-03-01 17.34.31

Since so many readers here were interested in my recent discussion of interfacing, here’s what happened this time.  I cut the neck facing out of a piece of leaf printed calico.  I actually cut it back out of a piece of patchwork, also unfinished.

2016-03-07 22.05.44

The interfacing fabric is a piece of a much loved kimono that has passed beyond the mending interest of my mother-out-law. You can see it layered under the facing here after stitching teh layers together but before finishing the edge.

2016-03-10 10.13.15

I think my mother-out-law is rather enjoying being able to send me her raggedy, beloved things as they get past the point of original use and getting stories of their conversion into all manner of other things.  I stitched the two pieces of fabric together and overlocked (serged) the outer edge.  Here it is pinned on and ready to stitch.

2016-03-10 13.17.32

And finally…

2016-03-14 15.27.03

Here is the back view:

2016-03-14 15.27.40

And some closer views…

2016-03-14 15.27.12

It is rather stiff at present, after its preparatory baths in soy milk mordant.  But that will change with more washing.

2016-03-14 15.27.50

All the little bits and pieces were, needless to say, so interesting to me that I patched them together months before I sewed the garment!

2015-12-13 15.20.52

8 Comments

Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures, Sewing

Tagged as , , , ,

February 15, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Transformation: Bed sheet to handkerchieves and napkins

There has been a casualty at our place.  A lovely, fine, cotton fitted sheet.  It wore through into holes! This is my favourite set of sheets, sadly.  A lovely buttery yellow and a beautiful fabric, bought for a remarkably low price when orphaned in a shop.  I didn’t want to relegate it to a dropsheet (something that protects the floor when you are painting).

2015-11-28 16.08.20

So, now that I have made friends with my roll hemming foot, I decided to practice, and made 45 cm square napkins and handkerchieves.  They look good.  Not perfect, but good!

2015-12-20 16.04.16

Several made it into a bucket of milk and then a dye pot. They are not quite what I had hoped for, but they are fine.  Clearly this cotton was harder to wet than some, and the milk mordant streaked along the lines where they fell into folds as they hung to dry.  That has left some really interesting patterns on the fabric.

2016-01-21 17.46.36

I am wondering whether to leave the remainder plain or action my original idea–an indigo dye pot in the heat of summer and some shibori style stitch resist decoration.  At the moment that feels like more than I can manage. In the meantime, I found some fine vintage looking lawn from an op shop  in the cupboard during a recent (cough!) spate of bag making and decided it was not appropriate for a bag but was perfect for more handkerchieves.  Evidently I am on the verge of becoming an evangelist of the hanky.  Brace yourselves!

2016-01-26 11.08.48

8 Comments

Filed under Leaf prints, Sewing

Tagged as , , ,

February 11, 2016 · 10:58 am

This week in guerilla gardening

2016-02-11 07.34.39

This morning, I went out with some saltbush I’ve grown from seed and some other plants a friend has grown and given me for guerilla gardening.  She comes from a coastal area and is growing plants well adapted (and mostly endemic) to her local sandy soils.  They are thriving in sandy areas of our suburb.  So the saltbush went in under a large river red gum in our neighbourhood, the better to protect the root zone of this giant tree.  Then I trundled around to a spot in the neighbourhood where the pattern of what will grow is very different to the rest of the patches I’m working, partly because the new beds created here in the wake of major infrastructure works are very sandy.

2016-02-11 07.59.34

In went several of these native hibiscus, an olearia, a kangaroo apple and a rhagodia (seaberry saltbush).  Out came weeds, alive and dead, and feral tree seedlings.

2016-02-11 08.00.28

The tiny E Scoparias that my friends and I planted months ago are thriving here but still small.  The council has planted a random eucalypt and a Manchurian Pear since we put them in, and they were much bigger–but they left the E Scoparias to live, bless them.  Let’s see how it goes.

Where previously nothing grew, now there are a lot of boobiallas (myoporum), some good sized olearias, a few saltbush and a couple of feijoas as well as the trees.  One saltbush is loving it here and has set fruit.

2016-02-11 07.59.59

As I finished watering the new plants in and set off to weed invasive grass out of a very successful patch nearby, one of the cyclists whizzing past called out ‘good work!’  It was a good way to start the day: kneeling in the earth and planting things that might help it heal.

6 Comments

Filed under Eucalypts, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as , , , , , ,

December 25, 2015 · 8:18 pm

Summer in the dye garden

Summer is a brutal time here in South Australia, and as I was writing, we had just had a record breaking heat wave where we were up over 40C for four days. In my case, however–not facing bushfire, and I feel for those who have and who will.  People have already died and summer is young.

2015-12-13 12.10.04

I took some photos before the heat wave… Hollyhocks, whose flowers have been going into the freezer as they fall.

2015-12-13 12.09.51

This year’s woad looking splendidly leafy.

2015-12-13 12.12.07

Last year’s woad flowering and seeding for all it’s worth.

2015-12-13 12.10.15

Our very own E Scoparia.  Last year, skeletonising caterpillars left just the veins of every single leaf in a lightning fast attack, but it has come back.  2015-12-13 12.11.31

Weld in flower (with rhubarb beyond).

2015-12-13 12.11.49

Japanese indigo seedlings, now blessedly in the ground.

2015-12-13 12.12.24

Cotinus looking like it will make it.

2015-12-13 12.12.54

The madder looking the worse for wear.  In Spring it was more like this…

2015-09-26 18.10.54

And the pansies, may they rest in peace (they didn’t make it through the heat wave), which have given a splendid collection of tired old flowers to the freezer.

2015-12-13 12.13.14

There is more… and I have been roaming the neighbourhood collecting bark and fallen hibiscus flowers and considering the other options too…

 

 

6 Comments

Filed under Dye Plants

Tagged as , , , , ,

December 19, 2015 · 3:04 pm

Happy unbundling

Before I went to Mansfield, I had a moment of imagining what it would be like to return from a sewing circle and re-enter the world of work at the crunch point of the year.  So I took some steps to create things to return home to. I gathered leaves and retrieved saved leaves.

2015-11-13 09.07.55

I decided on a well used round table-cloth I’d been given.  Much loved and much washed and presumed (by me) to be linen.

2015-11-13 09.08.03

No round tables here.  It was destined to be ripped and turned into something new.  I added in woad leaves and seeds as well as E Scoparia leaves and continus nipped from a tree that hangs over a fence.  Here is a stuff, steep and store jar of woad seeds where the silk thread within is turning purple, with a continus leaf for colour comparison.  Wow!

2015-11-13 09.47.30

The bundles went into the dye pot on the day I left home.  Just as I headed out to a laundrette to deal with a laundry crisis that reorganised my last day at home and shall not be detailed here.

2015-11-13 09.40.16

I pulled them out of the dye pot as I went to the airport. Finally, some time after I returned, unbundling time arrived.  The Euc prints are wonderful!

2015-11-23 17.53.36

I just love linen!

2015-11-23 17.53.20

The woad leaves and seeds left traces of green and burgundy and purplishness. But only traces.  The bundle may have been a bit too loose. Ah, but those few continus leaves gave purple!  Who knew?  Well, I didn’t!  But now I am glad I bought one on special at a nursery last winter.  It had lost its leaves and was not a prepossessing looking plant at the time, but now… well… I need to let it keep growing, clearly…

2015-11-23 17.52.20

14 Comments

Filed under Dye Plants, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures

Tagged as , , ,