You May Address Me As "Colour Wizard"

Will you look at that? The Bird of Paradise is blooming in the solarium, right in front of my loom! 

With such lush and beautiful plants growing on the other side of the glass, I don't think the winter blues will hit as hard this year. 

Today's been a wonderful and productive dye day. I realized this afternoon that all of this play is developing the palette for the entire residency project! I feel good about mucking around in the kitchen and taking my time. 

The quest for colour continues on hand in hand with plant dye education. One sweet lady took me out to the back yard last week to collect maple (acer saccharum) leaves "to make red dye". Sometimes it's easier (and kinder) to show people why their assumptions don't work rather than shoot down their good intentions, so I dashed around the yard like an idiot, bundled up the leaves in some tannin-mordanted muslin, and steamed the hell out of it. 

Ta Da! Not red, but still interesting. The black marks on the right are from where the bundle rested on a bent wire for steaming.

I haven't used the steam technique extensively until now, and it's very exciting. I dyed this plain weave cotton scarf with a mix of peony (Paeonia sp.), rose (Rosa sp.), pin cherry (Prunus pensylvanica), and purple laceleaf Japanese maple (Acer palmatum dis. atrop) leaves and a quick tannin mordant and I wrapped it around a rusty anchor for a post-mordant. I thought it was quite hideous at first. It wasn't until I pressed it and stood back to get a good look did I start to notice the depth, subtle colour shifts, and all those good things you hope for in a one-off dye experiment. 

Magic! Weird, weird plant magic!

I've been saving leaves from the Japanese maple in my front yard (acer palmatum var. atropurpureum) and fallen flowers from a Bougainvillea (sp.) living in the solarium for some sort of wacky experiment. This morning I hammered some into tannin-mordanted muslin a la India Flint. 

And the experiment turned out MARVELOUSLY! To the left is a garlic chive seed head, centre is the maple, and on the right are delicate Bougainvillea bracts. 

I tried steam setting the Bougainvillea with a few other things in a pot, and the colour diffused. It looks more like a dreamy watercolour rendition of the flower, so perhaps a quick steam set with an iron would work better. 


In any case, it's all very exciting! Tomorrow I'm going to plaster the town with posters for my story collection event, and if this rain ever lets up, I'll go out and collect plant matter for the eventual production of big dyebaths.