Tag Archives: friendship is the best form of wealth

December 17, 2013 · 2:46 pm

Harvest time: Eucalyptus Scoparia bark

‘Tis the season for bark collecting, again!  I’ve been out on my trusty bike visiting all the E Scoparias I know and investigating others that might prove to be (or not to be) E Scoparia. I pull my bike over to pack bark into a bag, trampling on it to crush it and make space for more, and filling again before loading my panniers.  Or, go to visit friends with my big bucket in hand and pick up whatever has fallen since my last visit.  Or, head out for a run, leaving my rolled up bag under a tree and pick it up to fill on my cool-down walk on the way back.  This E Scoparia, tucked in behind the foliage of a carob tree, is peeling lavishly.

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At home, I stash the bark in a chook feed sack, offering more opportunities for trampling which let me stack a lot of bark into one bag and get it into a form that will go into the dyepot with minimal fuss.

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This week, I found a new E Scoparia (at least, that was my hope).  I collected a bag full of bark and it is now soaking so I can test whether I have that right, in consultation with the dyepot. A friend who appreciates natural dyeing lives in this street–so I’ll look forward to telling her if she has a great dye tree at the end of her street! Blackett St:

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I also collected bark from this enormous specimen.  Last year I collected a lot of bark from this tree and then found I had one bag of bark that gave brown and not red to orange as expected.  I suspect that means this is not an E Scoparia.  Checking it out again today it is bigger than any other tree I believe to be E Scoparia and it has many more fruits visible and clinging to the stem.  My initial sense is that the bark smells different, too. The leaves give fantastic colour (at least they did before someone took a chainsaw to all the lower branches), but I am running a trial bark pot before the tree sheds the main part of its bark.  It is soaking alongside the other one as I write. Laught Ave:

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Next day, here are the dye baths, three hours in, presented in the same order as the trees from which the bark came. They look remarkably similar but smell quite different:

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Here are the (still wet) yarns that came from those dyepots, in the same order again.  Clearly, the second tree is not E Scoparia–or–for some reason its context means it doesn’t give the same colour.

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As I have had great results from the leaves of that second tree, I pulled the bark out, put some fallen leaves in, and re-dyed the tan skein…!

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December 16, 2013 · 9:00 am

Harvesting the neighbourhood: Dyer’s Chamomile

This summer, I have been collecting dyer’s chamomile for the first time.  I have some in the garden, gifted to me by a fellow Guild member who was keen to have some of my madder (this wish granted, needless to say)! It has white petals.

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But recently I found some with vivid yellow petals in the parklands beside the river Torrens.

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Our exercise class were astonished when I said I was planning to harvest while we were out on a DIY exercise session (our instructor was off doing the Busselton Ironman–she is our hero).  They offered to shield me from passersby who might intervene.  I think they underestimated how scared most people seem to be when they see someone doing something so inexplicable (to them)! I let them know I’d only be taking the dead flowers and we all relaxed again.  The patch is so big I really want to go back with more time… and it is flowering so generously, I am sure I have weeks in which to organise a return visit.

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Meanwhile, we’ve been harvesting at home, too.

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I keep thinking I’ll make rhubarb leaf mordant, and then not getting round to it!

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December 10, 2013 · 9:00 am

The never-ending parade of slippers

I have been working on some slippers… with long breaks in between activity… for such a long time! They came of some polwarth fibre that was not promising enough for fine spinning and that I thought would be best rendered into felt.  This is my go-to classic felting pattern, Bev Galeskas’ Fibertrends Clog pattern.  If you’re a regular around here you know by now that I have made many dozens of them.  I still think this pattern is genius… but  I am a little bit over it just at present, personally.  Anyway… some of these pairs had already suffered the indignity of being unsuccessfully dipped into indigo.  Time to try again!  I decided to pre-wet for evenness for once in my life.

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Finally, the time came for unnatural dyeing. I have two burners, and four pairs of slippers.  They’re big!  I decided to exhaust the dye and re-use the water on the second round of dyeing, which worked well.  It seemed a perfect opportunity to try this strategy out–after all, I am dyeing over chocolate brown wool for the most part.  Fine details of colour are not of real moment.

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Finally, I give you purple over brown, green over brown, red-brown-black (using up the leftovers of dyeing adventures past) and blue over brown.

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Sadly I’ll not be able to hand them over in person but I can’t bear to make my friends wait any longer!  We have had unseasonably cold weather here of late, and credibility on the question of whether they will ever see these slippers must be stretched to a very fine thread already!  So I am going to give them to a mutual friend who I am hoping will be happy to drop them in to warm chilly toes at the next opportunity.

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December 2, 2013 · 5:23 pm

Alas, poor Malcolm the Corriedale

We had a glorious visit to our friends in the hills on the weekend. There were recently shorn alpacas.  In black…

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In white…

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And in cinnamon.  But like the sheep, the brown alpacas were too shy for photos.  There was a woodlot of blackwood trees, and some stumps with very impressive fungi growing on them:

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There was a wealth of eucalypts and a knowledgeable community member who knew what many of them were. I brought home E Nicholii leaves (I have not had the chance to greet a fully grown specimen before, let alone a row of them), E Cinerea leaves and some massive juvenile E Globulus leaves.

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There was fine company, cake and scones and home grown cherries.  Not only that, but koala sightings and visits with rescue joeys (baby kangaroos whose mothers have been killed on the road, being raised by hand with tender loving care).  Such awesomeness!  I took lots of handspun yarn and left quite a bit behind where creative minds were whirling with plans and fingers were itching to get knitting… but there was bad news too.  I got to meet with the people who hand raised the corriedale whose fleece I have been working with most recently, from a lamb.  And sadly, poor Malcolm had recently and unexpectedly died, just before the shearer was due to visit.  We paused on Malcolm’s grave.  So it was special to have taken yarns made from Malcolm’s fleece to share… and I still have some, plus fleece that I dyed with eucalypts last week (it is E Scoparia bark peeling season) …

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And fleece that is prepared and ready to spin, from my recent coreopsis–osage orange–indigo dyeing season.  So… although I never did get to meet Malcolm, it’s conceivable I’ve spent more hours with my hands in his fleece than anyone…

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And I now have 5 alpaca fleeces and one from Lentil the sheep to think about and share around, such is the generosity of our friends!

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November 18, 2013 · 3:31 pm

Downsides of upcycling

Quite some time ago, I made a quilt.  It was a project I decided on when I began to experiment with India Flint’s eco-printing technique on cotton and linen.  Her book Eco-Colour (see the left hand sidebar of her blog if you’re following the link–her books are there) mostly focused on wool and silk, but offered some guidance about cotton and linen.  I followed that guidance as best I could and at first I could achieve only pinkish smudges.  I had become pretty decent at dyeing wool by this stage, but only some of these skills proved transferable.

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Leaf printing or eco-printing was clearly a whole other skill. I teach for a living and observe the process of learning almost daily both in those I teach and in myself.  It is very rarely possible to read instructions and then successfully and immediately carry out a process someone else (that would be India Flint) has spent years figuring out and becoming exquisitely good at.  Nor can the outcomes of a process with so many variables always be confidently predicted by a novice (that would be me). Indeed, just plain carrying out instructions accurately is not always possible on the first attempt.

The amount of fabric wastage that might be involved in learning and practising made me think I would have to give up and just admire the work of others.  India Flint, for instance. This was the point at which I thought of the quilt.  If I made a log cabin style quilt, I could frame whatever leaf-ish smudges were my then best efforts, and the smudgy parts could simply be borders.  Standards are not always high round here.

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By the time I came to halfway through the back of the quilt, I had been experimenting for about a year and I had some breakthroughs–in understanding the process, in refining my skills at using it, in mordanting, in identifying eucalypts, even growing a few.

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I made this entire quilt from recyled/upcycled linen garments from op shops and garage sales, most of them having gone there because they were stained beyond rescue.  Needless to say, I couldn’t bear to waste a scrap.  So even the tiny leftovers of the log cabin quilt were turned into other things.  Including bags–which won’t surprise regular readers!

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This bag has had a lot of use, because I like it so much.  Which is to say it has been treated roughly, stuffed full, rammed into other bags and rubbed against all manner of things.  And although parts of it are still glorious… including what must have been virtually my first really exciting E Cinerea, E Scoparia and E Nicholii prints:

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There are also some points of real wear.

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I often think that a well made, long lasting garment or bag is highly desirable. But a thing that will stand the test of time is only a good thing when the item remains one you (or someone else) want to keep using.   I own things that I wish would reach the end of their useful lives because I’m tired of them even though they don’t need replacement, or because a better version exists 20 years later.  I have things I wish I had never acquired or that don’t have the capacity to biodegrade.  I now think about the benefits of things that can break down and won’t last forever to burden coming generations.

This bag, though, has had a short life as a bag because of the hard life some parts of it had as clothing, and it certainly will biodegrade.  I polled some of my near and dear and they thought the bag should continue even if it required lots and lots of mends… So here it is, reworked considerably.

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And the other side…

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Ready for more years of hard use, I hope! For those who are wondering, the quilt is doing fine so far and I remain happy to use it.

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November 3, 2013 · 4:34 pm

What to do with art yarns/textured spinning

The other night, treasured friends came round for dinner and brought with them someone I hadn’t met before.  She saw the display of tea cosies and loved them.  She collects.  The honest truth is, I don’t even drink tea.  Nor does my beloved.  I just buy random teapots at the op shop and make them cosies for my own entertainment and the joy of giving them away.

Naturally, I said ‘would you like to take one home?’  She struggled to choose and I offered that she take two, but that wasn’t happening… it is difficult to make people understand just how far I am from having a yarn or tea cosy shortage.  So a particularly ugly teapot was disrobed and a corespun cosy with recycled sari silk threads went home with her.  That had me in a tea cosy frame of mind… So I delved into the stash and came out with this the very next night:

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The yarn is felted wool blobs spun onto crossbred wool from a sheep known by the glorious name of Macchiato the Mongrel.  I believe the epithet was added after Macchiato ate the neighbour’s pea crop and had to be found a new home.  That fleece came to me from a friend of a friend who lives in the hills. The pattern is a fast and loose adaptation of Funhouse Fibers’ Fast and Fun Tea Cozy.

This twining vine yarn (commercial wool top, felted leaves) was in the same bag.  I started in on a cosy and the audience decided it was too cute and really should be a child’s hat.  I guess we’ll wait to see who it fits come winter!  I started with a three stitch i-cord and made the rest up, ending with a stitched cast off for stretchy edge…

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And, some silk cocoons went off to be reeled by a friend with a  lot more patience than me, and here are the rest.  I have no idea why they are in two colours, but if anyone else knows, please tell.  I keep thinking I will finally get back to the nettle stems, but I fear it won’t happen today…

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October 25, 2013 · 1:54 pm

Silkworms: 6 week update

We still have a few silkworms.  28, to be exact.  The largest are now 7 cm or about 2 3/4 inches long. It’s hard to make photos of silkworms exciting, but here they are:

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Here is a picture of one silkworm starting its cocoon, or to put it the way we’ve been putting it around here, ‘becoming silk’.

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We have cocoons in two very distinct colours.  Mysterious.  All of the cocoons last year began pale and became golden very quickly–within the first 24 hours.  Not these.  Some are pale silver-white, with a slightly green hue in some cases. This is the view from above, looking down on a tray of paper and cardboard tubes.

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We have quite a few.  And about 28 still to add!  Luckily, I gave away about 70.  Some of which have been delighting schoolchildren, apparently.

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I am feeling deeply grateful to the friend who told me there was a mulberry tree behind the Japanese garden in the parklands.  It turned out there were three trees, two varieties of mulberry, and one of them was trailing leaves on the ground and down at head height across a path.  Begging to be pruned when I happened to pass with secateurs and a big bag, I tell you! I even ate a couple of mulberries that were almost ripe.

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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:

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

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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