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.

Grassroots, caterpillars

Alright chickens, I'm going to make this a million times easier for those of you out there who want to help but don't have a thousand or so dollars to spare. I have up to $500 dollars in the bank that I can shift over AND I have a PayPal account (and Square, too, if it comes to that). So if you have $10, $20 or even some spare change under the cushions of your couch you can PayPal it to me and I can wire the total directly to the bank on Tuesday and my landlord will never know the difference. Tweet me (@eatagar), text me or message me for my PayPal email or if you need a walk-through on how to do it. We are so very close and I want to make it possible for anyone to help White Buffalo Farm out, regardless of the size of your savings account. Little things become big things when we work together. A big thank you to the folks who have already donated, THANK YOU!

The video below should give you a better feel for what Wayne and the farm are all about and the difficulties small farms like this sometimes find themselves up against.

 

WBF call for aid from WhiteBuffaloFarm on Vimeo.

 

Plant-dye thriftscore

 

 

 

With spring finally asserting itself up here I've been cracking open my natural dye books and keeping my eyes open for ones I can't live without. I found an obscure spiral-bound beauty at the coffee shop & used bookstore down the street for a few dollars. It's one of those government extension office publications on the topic of what to replant in disturbed or stressed BLM and park areas. Which means its basically a guide book for a surprising number of plants that are useful as dyestuffs, on public land no less. Black walnut, rabbitbrush, sage, aspen, etc. Besides all of the diagrams it also has a section on each plant for its ideal habitat and associated species. I love the idea of having more than just photos as a visual reference and its uber-sciency, to boot. Plus it's pages are just begging for notes to be scribbled on them.

I have a sage dye pot going from clippings I brought home from grandpa and grandma's. I think the smell of sage is one of my happy places, now. Grandpa kindly agreed to try and grow some Japanese indigo for me. If I had more space of my own I'd like to think I'd create a polycultural dye garden, but as it is I barely have space for my tiny cold frame and pallet herb garden thing. So thank goodness for indulgent relatives.

 

Putting more Eco in my wirecore

So, ecoethical is an actual word. I didn't know that until the other day when I was trying to come up with a term to fully describe my yarn. Handspun is really only half the story since so many of the processes and materials I use are very deliberately chosen. I use a low impact dye process, my silk is either tussah or repurposed noil and my wool/alpaca base comes from rescue farm in Wisconsin. I need a way to get the other half of why my yarn is special across in the fewest, least obnoxious number of syllables possible. When 'ecoethical' popped in my head I goggled it and hooray! Lots of folks use it, I think I will too from here on out. As in: I make ecoethical handspun yarns. Or: My hand dyed art fiber batts are ecoethically produced.
I like it. It makes me want to push that particular envelope, too.
When I was at Renegade Austin my boothmates gave me an excellent tip. My wirecore yarn uses copper jewelry wire as the core and at $3 per 30 yards it feels a bit expensive. But one cheap source, outside of looting buildings, is alternator innards. It just so happens that my husband is terribly familiar with how to get used ones on the cheap. We've been using car junkyards to fix our crumbling Volvos for years. In fact, we happened to have an extra one in the trunk of Gerry's 164. I'm still not sure how much yardage I'll get, but at least the next batch of wirecore I make will feature repurposed copper wire in addition to all the other 'ecoethical' things Eat Agar does.