deliberately

I've been turning a bit inward lately. Spending less time in the studio and more thinking about projects I've shelved, playing Catan with the kids and listening to lots of music. I'm still producing, just at a reduced pace. I think it has a lot to do with the renaming and wanting to take the opportunity to be more deliberate rather than doing all the shoulds. What does this hybrid artform of mine look like when I take away all the expectations? What do I make when I just...make?

   
What's got leaf peepers thinking twice about driving up to the mountains this year has got me curious. There was a tree fungus that thrived from the unusual amount of water we got in the spring. The baby trees look like they were set on fire but the most established ones just have lots of funky leaves. Some with spots and some with burnt looking edges. Aspen makes one of my favorite yellows and greens. I'm wondering what kind of shift I might see in this years dye pot.

  

 I've been craving a new tattoo. Two actually. That Danielle LaPorte is a fantastic influence. She's putting out a range of gorgeous, shiney sacred geometry temp tattoos. The Metatron's Cube is calling to me. It contains all five platonic solids, reminding me a bit of that disc on Voyager that's supposed to be a crash course in what humans are. Only from the past instead of flying through the universe. The second tattoo is one I've been wanting for a few years now. It combines a Mollisonism and an image from Nausicaa of The Valley of the Wind. A stylized Ohmu with the phrase "everything gardens" underneath.

aspen & nettle

     The dye vats were calling to me after I finally finished a pair of custom gloves I've been sloooowly working on for the past few weeks.  I can't wait to show them to the person who asked for them. They're a longer version of the striped gloves I usually make for craft shows, but the requested yarn is also bulkier. This made them much warmer and makes me think more of hiking/biking than typing but they turned out beautifully all the same.

  
     The vats of aspen and nettle I have going are not beautiful. I let them ferment as they cold-process, leaving the dyestuffs in for as long as my nose can stand it. They've reached peak smelliness with that scuzzy mold on top. The nettle is the primary offender. The word putrid comes to mind before I even lift the lid. While that sucks for air quality in my kitchen, it also means that the pigments and the fiber are getting along famously. I finally cracked and cycled the first round of fiber out of the nettle and aspen this morning.

     I worked outside on the porch to minimize any lingering zombie stench, not to mention the mess. These chickadees were hanging out with me the whole time. Well, they were mostly hanging out in the aspen trees and the bird feeder. But, when I stopped for a bit to watch them one did get curious enough to investigate my shoes.



     Specific fibers interact with natural dyes in differing ways for lots of reasons. One thing I've noticed is that silk will take up color with vibrancy while wool is more subdued. This batch was a good illustration of that general rule. The silk and alpaca came out of the aspen bath dyed a bright acidy yellow and the hampshire wool came out of the nettle a pale sort of greenish yellow. There was still one more step. I started bottles of copper and iron tea last fall for afterbaths and mordanting.  This was my first opportunity to play with them. On the aspen-dyed silk and with the copper, at least, the effect was pretty magical. It went from that acid yellow to deep green. The nettle...eh. It was a deeper, kaiser green last year but then I also pretty much forgot about it for a month or two, leaving it in the closet. And I used scottish blackface wool, which takes up dye almost as greedily as silk does. Maybe I'll try that for round two.

From left to right, the aspen-dyed alpaca and silk with alum moradant, then iron afterbath and copper afterbath. The next photo is the nettle-dyed hampshire wool with the same progression: alum, iron afterbath, copper afterbath.

backyard wildcrafting

  Before the wind and frost take them all away I recruited the kids to help me gather up some of the aspen leaves. They have a little grove of quakies that surrounds a digging spot of their's and last week it practically glowed yellow. It didn't take long before they found other games to play but there were so many leaves on the ground that it only took a few minutes for us to fill the pot.

 Given a bit of heat and then some time to ferment, I've found that aspen gives up a yellow almost as bright as the leaves are right now. (That and an afterbath in iron tea will tip it over to green.) I plan on making up a few vats before the cold sets in and dyeing some alpaca and tussah I have on hand. Having our own yard now makes this plant dyeing stuff so much more convenient. Last year's aspen leaves were gleaned from the old Georgetown Cemetery.
I had a late start this year, but as of right now there is a vat of white sage hanging out on the back porch (soon to be brought in from the cold) and I have some nettle to harvest before it freezes. It probably won't give up as much color as it would have when the weather was still warm. But I bet I can still coax a pale Kaiser green out if it.

Help wanted

A couple of weeks ago the family and I meandered our way over the mountains to Paonia for the Mountain Harvest Festival. We packed up our vintage Explorer RV, the S. S. Bill Murray, and camped out in the town park. My mom came up and drove us around to visit grandparents in the area. We picked tomatoes and hit up Taco Time and my Grandpa Harold loaded us up with boxloads of apples and pears.

In between I was there to sell yarny stuff at the bazaar part of the festival. I wasn't sure what to expect because I've never done a craft show on the Western Slope. The feedback was pretty awesome, though. And the sales weren't bad, either. I had my first real custom order and got to demo spin for a bit during the farmer's market.
And something practically magical happened. Myriem stopped by my table and mentioned that she was from White Buffalo Farm. I think I may have squeed out loud a little. Paonia is a small town and the odds are probably smaller than I'd like to admit, but it felt like kismet to have connected with her. I discovered the organic farm online, while looking up things like permaculture and intentional communities. Myriem and Wayne(the current owner) have a plan to create an ecovillage within the farm, a place where artisans can develop a bit of "community-sufficiency" while working on both their craft and the farm. I have been daydreaming about running away to live there, or someplace like there since the doldrum-y dead of last winter. Myriem and I got to talking and we ended up taking a tour of the farm the day after the festival was over. It's situated by the river like the orchard I grew up on, with Akane apples(my favorite) among several other types of fruit and veg. They have lots of exciting plans for the place, including cob house-building workshops and farm-to-table events. Wayne is retiring soon, but it's also really important to him to preserve the legacy of the place. I think it's terribly clever of them and I want my family to be a part of it.

So of course there's a hitch. When is there not a hitch? This one comes in the form of a payment due to the bank by next Monday. They've raised the majority of it, but still need to come up with about $12,000. Here's the plan, in the form of an email Myriem sent to me this morning:

Dear Friends of Desirea! : )

Come on out for this lovely week of blue skies and aspen colors!
On the farm, we harvest tomatoes last week and are now harvesting Asian Pears.

I would be delighted to take you on a tour now that we are making such headway!

As you know, I am fostering the conditions conducive for a farm-based ecovillage in our region! As I write, we are setting the groundwork for an on-farm transition team and putting together an informal advisory board. In order to complete this process, I have an urgent appeal!

We need to raise 12k by Monday.
We are seeking loans of 2k to 5k with 25% interest.
Folks are to send payment directly to our bank in Paonia for deposit.
Funds need to be mailed by Wednesday afternoon or wired TH or FR or even on MON.
If we don't reach our goal, we'll return the funds immediately.
The farm has equity of $1million from which we would pay off this loan.
The early freeze hit us hard last week on our tomato crop.
Please spread the word.
This funding allows us to continue with building a transition team and move in the direction of a farm-based ecovillage.

Please call for bank account number.

Paonia State Bank
128 Grand Ave
Paonia, CO 81428

Once past this immediate hurdle, I would like to create a farm-to-table dinner and present our plans to Slow Food and others in the Roaring Fork. I'm looking forward to creating an exquisite event rooted in my French heritage. Je suis francaise heureuse de vivre dans une region gastronomique du Colorado! Folks from all over are welcome!

With gratitude,
Myriem

-- Myriem
Communications and Development
WHITE BUFFALO FARM
16877 Grange Road
Paonia, CO 81428

{What's in it for me?}
I mentioned a while back how I'd sometimes like to go home and this is one way of approximating that without condemning my kids to lonely-induced social awkwardness. I'd get to work on my fiber art and explore the other post-apocalyptic skill-set stuff I've been dipping my toes into all these years. Add community development to that and it's like I'd be doing my dream thesis in real life. "How do cultures on the verge of collapse perpetuate/preserve collected knowledge?" Let's find out! Then there's the potential for creating space for my mister to work on his guitar building thing and the Waldorf school down the road for the kids...

{What's in it for you?}
You mean, aside from the good, old-fashioned altruistic glow you'd get from doing an extra-good deed? When was the last time you were offered 25% interest on an investment? Or an invite to a picturesque, farm-fresh supper? Plus, if you happen to be of the notion that small farms are good and good food is hard to come by these days, this is an excellent opportunity to put some action where your heart is.

As I sit here on the floor of my kitchen, among the boxes and boxes of apples, pears and peppers we hauled home(I put up the last of the tomatoes yesterday), wishing I had a magic wand or maybe just better financial savvy, I'm also confronted with the possibility of making one dream into a reality, of flipping a lot of negative elements in our lives back into positive ones. Room to run, to develop my craft, to do work besides that I feel is meaningful. It's got some scary parts, too. There's a bit of risk involved in taking such a big leap. I'm willing to take it if it means getting to be a part of something so potentially amazing. But none of that can happen if there suddenly is no more White Buffalo Farm.

{More info on White Buffalo Farm}
http://whitebuffalofarm.org
https://www.facebook.com/WhiteBuffaloFarm
http://directory.ic.org/1691/White_Buffalo_Farm_Ecovillage
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/us/colorado-communities-take-on-fight-against-energy-land-leases.html

Foraging for color

I have a new hero, her name is India Flint. Between her and Rebecca Burgess I am feeling pretty excited about this dyeing fluff with plant stuffs business. When I went back home this summer to visit family I came back with all kinds of roots and flowers and leaves to try out. My grandparents helped me pick tickseed coreopsis along the roadside and after going through Harvesting Color with me my Grandpa John pointed out that he had several sorts of pants from the book right in his yard. In Georgetown I discovered wild hops and pokeberry, possibly leftover a time when folks still ate poke sallet and homebrewing was less a hobby than what you did if you wanted some beer in the house. So, between all those foraged bags of plant matter I've built up quite the stash of yellowy, purple-grey, earthy and acid green fiber. With winter coming on I'm wishing I got out there more, stashed and dried some rabbitbrush and sage at least. But that's what winter is for-planning and scheming for the things I'll do come spring.

I'll leave you with this mini-photo essay. It documents the process I meandered through from foraging to dyeing with aspen leaves, the last plant I gathered before the cold really set in here. In between the steps I was reading India Flint's amazing book, Eco Colour and getting lots of ideas to augment what I had already learned and put into practice with Rebecca Burgess' book. I highly recommend reading both if this is a subject that catches you, too.

 

I gathered most of the leaves from the old Georgetown Cemetery. It's part Royal Tenenbaums and part The Graveyard Book. I noticed that the place is also a bit of a botanic garden, so I'm sure to go back soon.

I left the leaves in my kitchen for a bit, too long I thought when I went check them again. So I added some fresher leaves from my yard and used an India Flint trick...I let them hang out in one of my pots for a few days. I giggled a bit when I stirred them one morning and they started talking to me with fermentation bubbles.

 

I know, I know. Pee in a bottle, right? But this is the color I got after a few days of cold, fermenting extraction. The next step was putting the pot and some fiber of various mordants over low heat and repeating that cycle a few times.

Which got me this handful of fluff, dyed a deep, earthy yellowy-green. I noticed that the color of the dye bath had deepened to an orange color and now I'm repeating the cold/hot cycle with some unmordanted fiber.

 

One thing that caught my attention in the cemetary was the abundance of lichens. Normally it's an ecological taboo to go scrapping this slow-moving, low-yielding symbiosis all helter-skelter. But cleaning it off of old gravestones is one of the exceptions.