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.

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.

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.