Well, the outcomes are in– E Scoparia bark on the left and E Poyanthemos bark on the right.
As I was rinsing my pots a sudden movement caught my eye.
All those cuttings and seedlings and little trees are doing well, because, we have finally had some lovely rain!
It’s lovely to see water pooling after the long dry of summer.
And, a lovely pair of warm socks for the coming winter chilly toes have made their way off the needles!
They have gone to their happy home already…
Filed under Dye Plants, Knitting, Natural dyeing
At the end of the year, my sisters and I were out walking and gathered some E Polyanthemos bark. This is a purely speculative dye pot. And it has been waiting in a cardboard box. I moved it to a dye pot and came out next day to add water. Do you see what I see?
Yes, it’s a redback spider! She got away from me before I could get her out of the pot, so I put the lid back on and left it for another day. I don’t want to kill her this way.
Finally I got back to the pot and couldn’t find the redback, but she appeared as the water level rose and I managed to get her out without putting my fingers in!
Here are the pots prior to heating. E Polyanthemos in the foreground and E Scoparia in the back.
Filed under Natural dyeing
We did observe earth hour.
I liked it a whole lot, even if it was a small thing to do. It didn’t change my mind about having a bigger plan for earth hours of my own.
So I decided on some more morning saltbush planting. I headed out to a site a few blocks away where my friends and I have been revegetating under a beloved tree for some years now. You can see the understorey we have managed to build up where before it was barren and weedy and regularly poisoned by council. The earth here used to be hard and dry, but now it has softened and contains much more vegetable matter–I mulched it with the leaves falling in the nearby gutters to keep the soil growing. Mulch is one of my favourite forms of loving the soil. It’s extraordinary to think of that cycle of nutrients–it is so wonderfully effective and simple to support–but so biologically complex and amazing I am not sure magic could be any better.
Here is the aerial view of the trailer as I set out, complete with full watering can! I must say carrying that went much better than I could have hoped possible…
I weeded and pulled out dead bushes that were once the only native plants growing under this tree. They finally succumbed this summer. I collected more seed. How wonderful to have plants old enough to be fruiting so well here now.
On the way back, I had an empty watering can, dead branches, weeds and some bark for my dye pot, and I trimmed creeping boobialla that came originally from my Dad’s garden. He grew me a few by layering the plants in his front garden. It has really taken hold here and it is helping crowd out the invasive grasses that we’re weeding out all winter each year.
I cut the boobialla where it was growing out over the kerb and where it is most vulnerable to passersby, because I have a plan. Now it is cutting propagating time and not really saltbush planting time, I thought I could try seeing if I can grow more boobialla over the cooler months, when it’s my experience I can’t get saltbush to germinate. Let’s see how that goes!
Filed under Neighbourhood pleasures
What with all the bark collecting there’s been… there have been some bark dye pots too.
I smash the bark up small, the better to create a nice, strong dye.
After heating, I get something more like this…
For some reason the light out the back is making things look less spectacular rather than more spectacular (as is my camera’s usual tendency) as we head into summer–but as you can see I have scaled up to colour separation… grading the colours and carding them separately. One of my friends put me onto this strategy and I just love it. She’s very clever about colour and I feel lucky to have the benefit of her wisdom.
And then carding…
And more carding… and finally spinning, which is underway. I hope your holiday season has treated you well and the new year is looking promising. I think this kind of preparation, time consuming and sometimes boring as it is, always makes me think that promising things are in the future, and this is a year in which the collective project at our place involves focusing on optimism. I will gratefully accept tips!
Filed under Fibre preparation, Natural dyeing
It is the season when a lot of eucalypts shed their bark here. It’s impressive… here are a couple of local and spectacular examples… E Scoparia:
And closer up:
Corymbia Citriodora:
Needless to say there has been some collecting, though I haven’t done as much as I thought I might so far… often it’s just a bagful when I pass.
But one time when we went to visit for dinner with some saltbush to plant out we just brought back the wheelbarrow full!
It has led to dyeing, especially now I’m done with work for the year!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures
There came a point in the end of year crazy-pants where I couldn’t stand all the bits and pieces that were lurking around my office/sewing space. Finally, I decided to take action. Who needs a potato sack in residence in their work space for months? It went the way of so many potato sacks round here. This one was a particularly nice sack, with quite a complex weave structure (for a hessian sack). The printing was even less wash fast than usual (for a hessian sack) but hopefully it will now have another life being appreciated for its carrying qualities.
Then there were all the small pieces of fabric left over from other things. I created patchwork from them and soon had enough for a bag (or two!) lined with eco-prints I like less.
These are mostly small pieces of pre-loved garments that have been turned into other things, with or without prior leaf prints. This one has already gone to a happy home with friends who use bags all the time.
And then there was the ongoing bag patching ritual. There were three or four new holes… so my favourite bag got yet another patching job. From this:
To this!
Filed under Leaf prints, Sewing
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.
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.
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.
I think these fabrics will make a good quilt border, and hopefully I now have enough to get all the way around my quilt.
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!
Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing
There has been some more bundle cooking for my friend. She handed over these massive bundles–they are bedsheets. We’d walked over to visit with a bale of straw for our friends’ hens… and walked back with the bundles and cartons of fabric. I spent time helping a friend clear out her Mum’s sewing room recently and since then have been finding new homes for sewing machines, yarn, fabric and a wide array of other items. Some of my fellow guildies were delighted to take possession of tapestry bobbins…
Here are the parcels going into the pot, packed with dried leaves. My friends have an E Scoparia at the end of their street, and that’s what was inside the bundle… leaves and some bark, too!
Some time later…
And being unbundled!
One had remarkably little in the way of distinct leaf prints. I am amazed that there was enough dye in those leaves to colour so much fabric. Unrolling…
Flapping about over the lawn, wet from the dye pot…
The second one had some prints in closest to the centre of the bundle.
Glorious! A third immense bundle has gone home with my biggest pot, for some time on a gas burner. I love that big pot but it just doesn’t work with my electric burners. This is going to be one fabulous set of sheets!
Filed under Leaf prints, Neighbourhood pleasures
I began with this… a much worn and washed and somewhat faded and darned merino singlet. There was also a silky merino infinity scarf, but the ‘before’ picture was not too exciting.
And there were these… four bundles friends had wrapped up and prepared for the dye pot. So much creativity…
Needless to say, heat and eucalyptus worked their magic.
By next day, I had these bundles to pass on to my friends at the local farmers’ market (where one was unwrapped on the spot)!
My two were unwrapped on my happy return from Back Country, which seemed entirely appropriate to me.
Here they are, wet and glorious, freshly unbundled.
The silky merino was more red/yellow and orange–and the overdye full of greys and blacks and reds.
Finding daylight and sunshine to photograph in has been challenging, but… I am wearing the scarf today at work and feel very snug and cheery about it.
And the singlet looks even darker and richer than this photo, and the darning has receded into the background quite suitably!
Filed under Eucalypts, Leaf prints, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures
The time has come for some of my clothes to find new uses. These worn out jeans have had years of use as jeans…
I made these shorts from a length of linen I found on a pile of hard rubbish on a Brisbane kerb when I was there one summer. They have had years of hard wear and been re-dyed once or twice. Surprisingly enough the screen printed design on the pocket details didn’t take dye!
They are now completely threadbare in places that would create embarrassment if they were to fail, further evidence of the hard wearing qualities of linen.
I paired the jeans up with some leftovers from past sewing adventures, which finished out the lining.
The jeans pockets went on the inside, retained for future use. The outside features the pockets of a pair of hemp shorts that hit the dye pot some time ago.
I teamed the linen shorts up with the remainders of a pair of men’s twill cotton pants bought for a dollar from the Red Cross.
I love a beautifully executed pocket, and there are two of them featured on the outside of this bag, while the back pockets of the shorts are still on the inside of the bag.
In between the sewing, I spent the weekend mordanting fibre and continuing to try to exhaust dye baths from the workshop a fortnight ago! By the end of the weekend I was down to pastels… And there was the odd Stuff, Steep and Store jar to be going on with. Using the microwave has lowered the barriers to taking an opportunistic dye find or something that seems promising but whose dye properties are unknown to me and putting it up for future reference. Here, rat-nibbled pomegranate remains collected off the ground… as no edible pomegranate would be turned to dye at our house!
Filed under Leaf prints, Natural dyeing, Sewing
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