Tag: plants

Get your pots and jars ready

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Corn Marigold / Glebionis segetum / gul okseøje

Soon the plant dyeing season will be upon us, so it’s time to find yarns and get them mordanted (I always do this ahead of time and then just keep the labelled skeins on hand). This year I’ll be working with more natural mordants such as sea water, tannins, soy and rhubarb leaves.

I’m looking for cheap silk yarns and/or fabrics that I can cut into swatches to add to my sample library. As well as cotton.

I’m also going to help myself to some structure by creating a section for it here on the blog with an easy access plant list of which I’ve done and how, update my tags and some other stuff I’ve been thinking about, hoping that it might prove useful for other people as well. I have a few science experiments in mind that might interest you…

I take requests for topics! Who knows, maybe my library contains items I haven’t even thought about mentioning yet. But please be patient, I won’t be finishing this off in a day or two. In fact I’m feeling a bout of blog fatigue coming on, so we’ll see how it goes!

Corn Marigold / Glebionis segetum / gul okseøje
Tussah silk dyed with the flower above (and a few of its friends)

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danishDet er ved at være tid til plantefarvning lige om snart – mon der kommer nye vaidplanter? SÃ¥ det er nu man skal i gang med at samle garn, fÃ¥ det bejset osv. sÃ¥ det er klar hvis man lige skulle fÃ¥ lyst til at smide noget i gryden! I Ã¥r har jeg tænkt mig at lege med naturlige bejser som havvand, rabarberblade, garvesyre og soyamælk i stedet for eller sammen med metalbejserne.

SÃ¥ jeg er pÃ¥ jagt efter bomuld og silke, som garn eller stofrester jeg kan bruge til at lave prøver med. Gerne billigt…

For at hjælpe mig selv til at holde struktur på tingene, og måske være en hjælp til andre, går jeg i gang med at udvide plantefarvningssektionen her på bloggen med lister, opskrifter, links, tips og andet. Jeg tager også imod forslag til emner, måske ved jeg noget, som jeg bare ikke har tænkt på at skrive om endnu?

Og jeg vil gøre mit bedste for at også opdatere det hele på dansk. Det kommer nok lidt i bidder hen ad vejen, så kig forbi i ny og næ.

Contraption

PiaChit Chat

See what we made today, so I can start my seeds indoors. I still need something at the bottom front to completely cat proof it, but it was the best we could come up with. The only south window where we can close the door is the bedroom, and that window is open at night even in light frost. The two west windows are much bigger and even worse to secure.

spire

En forspiringsreol, næsten kattesikret. Til at begynde med taper jeg lige noget plast på fronten i bunden, men vi har snakket om at lave et par lette låger der lige kan hængsles på, så de hverken kan springe eller klatre. Soveværelsesvinduet er åbent om natten også på denne årstid, og det er det eneste sydvendte vindue, hvor kattene ellers kan holdes væk.

Dye plans 2013

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Well, after ranting about to-do lists, I guess I should be cautious about setting things in stone, but of course I’ve had some thoughts about what I wanted to do this year.

I’m fed up with just sampling, although I haven’t tried all there is to try. So I’d really like to dye larger quantities to actually use for (knitted) projects, I have tonnes of dried dyestuff and more likely to happen with my garden plans implemented (time to order seeds!). This means I have to spin A LOT of generic yarn or find a nicer yarn base to order in bulk, that I can whip out for a sweater dye project or whatever, whenever. Which requires some $£€! so I’m holding my horses, but also feeling I need to do something or I’ll be stuck not dyeing at all. I want NICE stuff, not just whatever random skeins I can find in a supermarket. My current yarn base for plant dyeing is fine, but I wouldn’t wear it, you know?

So apart from my plant to-try list, producing and collecting dye material, my goal is to figure out WHAT I want to use my plant dyeing for. Knitting, felted items, fiber “paintings” or just sell the surplus? Leave it on a shelf in the “Collected skills” box?

hhock01

During the meanwhile, I have a hollyhock test project on the stove for y’all, coming real soon.

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Plantefarveplaner for 2013

Jeg har spekuleret lidt over, hvad jeg egentlig vil med min plantefarvning, det har været sjovt, men det bliver ogsÃ¥ lidt kedeligt at bare producere testgarn og eksperimentere. PÃ¥ den anden side har jeg ikke nogen reelle projekter sÃ¥dan lige planlagt, som jeg kan sætte i gang. Enten skal jeg finde nogen gode strikkegarner og købe et kæmpe lager jeg lige kan trække en sweaterfuld ud af ved lyst og behov til farvning, jeg kan spinde og spinde og spinde hvidt og bygge et lager, jeg kan sælge det jeg producerer. Eller skal jeg gÃ¥ i gang med at filte og billedvæve, hvor jeg kan bruge de smÃ¥ testfed til noget reelt? Jeg kunne ogsÃ¥ bare lægge det pÃ¥ hylden og føje det til listen over “Ting jeg kan”.

Så mit største mål i år er ikke kun at få sået lidt flere farveplanter (noget skal der jo alligevel gro i haven), men også finde ud af, hvad jeg egentlig kan bruge det til. Der er jo kun et begrænset antal timer i døgnet til kreative projekter, som jeg til gengæld har nok af!

Paper prints

PiaChit Chat

Dry flowers apparently aren’t my thing, they look very dull and broken, some leaves might be useful. I don’t know if I went overboard squishing them real hard with clamps on the books?

I do still plan to try some garden printing, when time allows. There must be stuff out there that I can use even late in the season! Maybe I can do it on pieces of cloth that I plan to plant dye, if I use acrylics, they shouldn’t wash off no matter what I put the material through afterwards, at least that’s the deal when I get it on my clothes…. (does anyone paint and manage to look pretty throughout?) I wish I had some more fluid paints than the ones I have, guess I’ll have to invest in Golden acrylics next time.

In the meantime I saw those posts on plant dyeing on paper, which I just had to give a go although late in the season. Next summer and flowers and new dyebed (which hubby at the moment has decided to till for me as a first prep! Yay him!)

First session went quite well although I had no idea how to “steam” the paper, nor how to best keep the sandwiches tight and not floating apart. So I’ll be getting some alder leaves and some coreopsis from the freezer, and hey! How about all those dry homegrown weld and Dyer’s chamomile I collected!? Any Woad leaves left out there I wonder?

Time to get a bit scientific about it. Two pair of sheets soaked in vinegar, two in aluminium acetate. Alder leaves, more yellow birch leaves and Liquidambar styraciflua. Another sandwich, same mordants, strawberry leaves green and yellow, sage, celandine. In between the 2 sets, a layer of frozen coreopsis tinctoria and blue columbine flowers.

Then there’s the consideration of temps. Will a too high temp give dull prints? How low can you go and still get steam? I started with 150 C because 100 didn’t seem to get steamy. 120 doesn’t seem to quite work either, no visible steam anyway.

I’m showing both front and back of some sheets, since they could be used either way.

Unfortunately at some point in the drying process, I lost track of which 4 sheets were aluminium soaked instead of vinegar, AND forgot in which way they were different. I could identify them by which first sheet has the grate imprint from the oven, but after a 3 day break I also forgot which batch was on the bottom. DUH. Scatterbrain.

I’m happy enough with these results that I’m going to keep playing with paper and plants. Test which seasons give the best results and see if I can find any info on it. Some also say use “dead” leaves collected from the ground, some even use older leaves and soak them first. Hmmmm – I wonder about the above pressed flowers and stuff now?!

A short search gave me:

Cassandra Tondro on eco printing with a recipe (backwards) for paper steaming

The natural surface – great forum

Dip and stain

Threadborne list of plants to use

Next challenge: If I order a new batch of water colour paper, can I resist getting pens and inks and other lovely supplies while I’m at it?! Now that I’m getting a micro painting studio and all….

Cloths part 3

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Time for the last set of plant print experiments! I wasn’t really inspired to attempt any nice photography, so I just popped them in the flatbed scanner for you.

Sheet from last batch as well as the “mystery fabric that doesn’t take any colour” (I think we’ll just call it Homer from now on) had a bath in aluminium acetate then some powdered madder root and a handful of dried hollyhock heads, and the sheet, previously dyed brown from longterm exposure to celandine, had a short bath in – well, celandine. Not a lot of improvement, so I wrapped it up with some fern leaves. Nothing much happened for weeks, so I steamed it. And if you squint you might just be able to see a weak fern pattern…. Mostly, what I got was a bunch of brown, mouldy fabrics smelling like a cow’s a*se.

The raspberry leaves did print nicely – from the top side of the leaves only, the fabric covering the back of the leaves have 0 change. And, well, the lupine leaves? yawn…..

I actually think I’m giving up on this. Rose leaves gave me nothing. Alchemilla mollis, nothing.

I may however, decide to try with paper, after reading this blog. Tell me it isn’t cool!

http://wendyfe.wordpress.com/tag/eco-prints-on-paper/

Of course, I’m rapidly running out of leaves, so this will be for another year. Tomorrow I’ll go check if any more of these are still up (and no, I can’t imagine they’ll actually print red)

Liquidambar styraciflua

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Plantefarvning på stof

Tid til flere eksperimenter inden sæsonen er slut! Lupinblade og bregner rullet ind i bomuld. Forsøgte mig ogsÃ¥ med rosenblade – ingenting skete. Faktisk skete der absolut ingenting med nogen af mine forsøg ved at blot lade stoffet ligge med planter i og holde det fugtigt, sÃ¥ jeg prøvede at dampe/koge et par stykker. Hindbærblade virkede ligesÃ¥ godt som egeblade, men kun fra forsiden. Tørrede stokrosehoveder var derimod forbavsende gode, glæder mig til at farve garn med dem.

Og der sker lige nøjagtig ikke ret meget, ud over at det begynder at stinke efter en måneds tid, så nu tror jeg ærlig talt ikke jeg gider prøve igen lige foreløbig, slet ikke på bomuld i hvert fald.