landscapes

I took a weekend off last week, heading over to the western side of the state to gather dyestuffs and write. NaNoWriMo is a few months away and I came so close to finishing last year that I want to give it another, more planned out, try. I have a few new ideas about how I want to format the story. Maybe as a zine? I'm also narrowing the physical range of the main character, making it more local.

 On the way up to Grand Mesa I stopped briefly in the desert, up above the canyon where I grew up. I followed a hawk down this draw and found several patches of rabbitbrush, one seeded juniper and horehound. I didn't realize it was horehound until I got it home and was able to look it up. I thought it was a prickly sort of mint. Now I wish I had picked more, but at least I know where it lives. It felt like stumbling across a whole glass bottle from the 1800's.

 When I got home I put all of the plants in the dyepot together. It smelled amazing! The rabbitbrush can be overpoweringly medicinal on it's own but the rest of the plants balanced it out and it was like having a giant potpourri crock going on the stove all day.

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.

high summer, deep shade

My focus has been on the dye pots lately. There is so much to gather, so many things are peaking, flowering, on the verge of fading. My goal is to have a studio full of plant dyed fiber that I'll mix up into yarn during the fall and winter.

It's not just dyestuffs, though. We found a dandelion patch on a walk to the cemetery a few weeks ago. The red stemmed kind that I swear taste better than the usual green stemmed sort. It's also a good mushroom patch. There were scads of puffballs, even a few alien looking orchids. They look like orange-red asparagus before they bloom.

I don't have a shop update this week. Toby's scarf took up all my productivity. I do have a few new things to introduce. A new twist on the spinning kits, maybe some new yarn. On a less than fibery note, I've also been Desire Mapping. I'm not usually one to go in for woo, but the woman behind the method passes my bullshit test and the message speaks to me so I'm giving it a go. My core desired feelings are: illuminated, shakti, prolific and quixotic.

black walnut

     I've got things in the works. Namely, a dye class in the first week of December and a craft show during the second, plus stocking up for Christmas Market in Georgetown. Which also means I have a whole lot of spinning and knitting and dyeing ahead of me.  Adding NaNiWriMo to all that was an awesome idea, too, right? It hasn't been all that difficult actually. It helps that I've been doing research for it for years now. And 1,700 words per day is not as impossible to get through as it seemed. My main concern is what happens when I run out of things to write about. Hopeful that won't happen before I get to 50,000.

     In between all the hands one stuff I have to get done I've added a few vats to work themselves out in the background. Here's a shot of the black walnut. It's as smelly as it looks. All those bubbles mean its fermenting which hopefully means its releasing a lot of dye compounds, too. Although with black walnut, I hear, a little goes a long way.

visiting

We went to visit family last weekend and brought home what's become a regular assortment of veg and dyestuffs. There were even a few immature cotton bolls to play with and a surprise patch of japanese indigo. The kids splashed around in the ditch and picked popcorn and ran around with the dog. Most of what came home has been eaten or processed by now. The tomatoes were roasted and canned up, the green beans were munched like edamame with leftover ham the first night we got home. There was even a baby ladybug that hitched a ride in the squash and got transplanted to an aphid-ridden artichoke I'm attempting to overwinter.

                                                 

The dyestuffs have been put to work now, too. All of these are hanging out in various canning pots and those giant pails you use for beer brewing, tucked into a corner of the kitchen to ferment and soak up the color. Some were heated beforehand to draw out the dye, some were not and some don't even have fiber in them yet because I haven't quite made it to that step. I'll get there...eventually. The only plant I haven't harvested yet is rabbitbrush. I'm not sure what I'd put it in, I seem to be out of large pots. Maybe I'll skip it this year, unless I run into a good patch of it out there. There's no shortage of it, but sometime soon it'll all have gone brown for the year. 

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.

Walks in the woods

I don't have a lot of words right now, so here's a photo essay. We've been going on walks into the woods lately. There are tiny wild raspberries and scads of different kinds of mushrooms to try and identify. Toby loves shaking the aspens to make it rain and Anais is always on the lookout for the next pear-shaped puffball.

 

 

Thank yous

Last week we finagled our way over to the Western Slope to harvest some of the Japanese Indigo my grandparents were growing for me (thanks, grandparents!). Getting there turned out to be an adventure. Both of our cars' brake systems stopped working by the time we were supposed to head out there and my mom ended up driving up just to drive us back to Grand Junction the same day. And then, after the indigo project and a trip to the Mesa with the Grandparents Holton, she drove us home. (Thanks, Mom!)

This was my first attempt at growing my own dyestuff from seed and I've been psyching myself out a little. There are just so many steps to it and alkaline dyebaths seem to be a little more chemically than more acidic ones. Plus, there is that whole thing where I try to read directions, I really do (sometimes), but in the middle of everything I tend to just go for it and hope for the best. That works for me about 90% of the time. The rate of success tends to go down the more steps there are and this indigo process has quite a few. In fact, in the future I think I'll be taking a combined note from India Flint and Rebecca Burgess and use fermentation vats. There are fewer steps, bran and corn syrup aren't nearly as icky as Spectralite and heat doesn't play quite so big a role.

Everything turned out fine, if a little pale. Next time I'll know better than to stuff so much fiber in the pot. And to slow the heat down somehow...my Dad lent me one of those propane powered set-ups you use for deep-frying a turkey and it was actually pretty perfect for dyeing on the road. I also claimed one of the old camping backpacks he had in the garage. And a tent. And discovered he has a polishing tumbler thing that might come in handy if I do end up making my own copper toggle clasps for woven cuffs. He caught me eyeballing it and said I could bring the clasps to him if it came to that. Thanks, Dad!

The kids are still asking about when when we'll go back to the cabin. It's my Uncle Milo's (Thanks, Milo!) set up a little ways up Grand Mesa on some property my Dad's parents own. They've had plenty of rain so there were lots of mushrooms and, to the kids' delight, frogs! Not to mention mud. Toby lost his shoes shortly after breakfast. I found a bonus crop of stinging nettles in the woods to toss into the dyepot when we got home. I have scabs on my hand from the itchy blisters they gave me as I was picking them, but (thanks to all that rain?) they hadn't flowered yet and the color looks pretty deep so far.

All weekend I felt supported and encouraged by my family. I usually do on trips back home. We aren't a touchy-feely bunch of people, generally speaking, but actions speak louder sometimes and I feel really lucky to have them all in my life, putting up with my black sheepy ways.

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.

 

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.