Ashes and Diamonds

Apologies for the lack of posting last week- I worked every day and didn't get studio time until Saturday. Thank the gods this is a 3 studio day week, and oh what a gloriously productive and happy week it's been! 

First up, I need to thank the Guild members yet again for their support and understanding while I've been trying with varying degrees of success to sort my shit out. It's probably been pretty annoying to deal with me, and I've yet to help wash the teacups. Secondly, I need to thank the Burlington Public Library for being awesome in pretty much every way possible. If you ever visit this town, have tea with the Guild at the BAC, and then go to the library and talk to Lauren after you've biked along the waterfront trail. 

I swear nobody paid me to endorse all that. 

If you would like to pay me to endorse all that, shoot me an email! My rates are reasonable. 

What's chased some of the gloom away? Phone calls, movies, meetings, and studio time. I've been talking to dear ML. out East about living inspired lives and staving off boredom/stagnation, and we (the Guild and I) have been working on the info package for the residency program for the coming year, I'm making things in the studio and work's crystallizing, and I watched "Ashes and Diamonds" like... four times (amazing, inspiring, gut-wrenching, gorgeous movie! Find and watch it)! 

Something happened in that conversation with ML. last week that shifted my attitude towards my living space and life here. I need to do more strange and small things, things like building blanket forts in the bathtub, curating exhibitions of glassware, colouring with crayons... Inspiration comes from many sources, and it's too easy to get stuck in a negative headspace when you're far from the people and animals you love and you're constructing your life, post-graduation.  

I'm getting more encouragement and inspiration from the studio stuff. It's magically shaping up. Armed with weird coloured odd yarns, I sat down to start weaving on Tuesday.

various yarns and cloth dyed with avocado, cochineal, walnut, kamala, tea, and a six-pound rusty anchor.

All of the boxes were made (and made possible by the Potter's Guild) on Tuesday too. Look at 'em! They'll be white once fired.

Easy way to spread a warp: throw a few shots of fine thread and beat into place. Repeat a couple of times and TA DAA! So much easier than sticks or rag. The next time I do this for tapestry though, I will add a solid something before weaving to give a firm base. This method's a little flimsy for tapestry and I found my first inch of weaving slid back on the warp. 

plus it's pretty...

Free-form tapestry in progress (note: I'm over-dyeing all of this nonsense):

of course there's weird shit in here! 

Since weaving 12 panels in this fashion would take an insanely long time, I'm changing the construction of the boxes a little, and for the better...

And did I mention I'VE JUST FINISHED KNITTING A SOCK?  

First Studio Day of the Year

I was in the studio by 9:30am and up to my elbows in plant matter and water shortly after! My goals: sample eucalyptus and kamala, spend time developing things for sale, work on embroidery project, and log a 10 hour day. 

The eucalyptus branches I was given were from the Royal Botanical Gardens here in Burlington/Hamilton. I shredded them (and forgot to set aside whole leaves for hot bundling), simmered them, and added some silk and wool. Ground dried fruits from the kamala tree (or lotus tree) were also given to me by a wonderful guild member. I added the powder to water and salt in a jar, and heated it with wool, silk, cotton, and St. Armand watercolour paper. 

The pot on the left is eucalyptus without a mordant, and the jar contains kamala. The other pot has a mixture of eucalyptus, vinegar, iron, and fibre. Amazing, eh? The unmordanted mixture gave lovely soft champagne and pale brown on silk and wool respectively, but the altered bath (and here I must give credit to India Flint for suggesting vinegar) gave perfect greys, or black had the concentration of dyestuff been higher. 

Kamala, though difficult to soak out with water, gives bright saffron yellow on silk, a slightly murky yellow on wool, and pale buttery yellow on the cotton and paper. I'll take pictures of the samples the next time I'm in the studio!

I'd like to visit the RBG and ask for eucalyptus cuttings, or frequent the florist downtown. It would be such a neat project to go through the botanical gardens and sample their plants...

unidentified eucalyptus

Teasels given to me by a guild member. They're sharp!

Moving along, I tried eco-printing fallen bourganvillea bracts on St. Armand paper, and it worked wonderfully. Possible product line...

I didn't manage 10 hours, but a solid 9-hour studio day is felt pretty good. I spoke with the clay studio technician and she's still on board with my project, so pretty much all I have to do is acquire more materials and dyestuff before I can move forward. 

Christmas Stock

I've been consumed by dye experiments lately. Ah, someday this will all be part of a grand thesis, but for now it'll be incorporated into this year's holiday product line. 

The results of pounding plants into cloth to see what happens are very pleasing. Since they're not going to be worn or handled a great deal, I'm not terribly concerned with the colour being wash fast. Steaming and pressing them with a hot iron has made some of the pigments able to stand up to a light spritzing with water, and most are fairly lightfast. The samples below have been made into cards for the upcoming BAC Christmas sale! 

And the background carpet is pretty sweet. 

A few little samples were turned into ornaments. I don't have a sewing machine here, so they're all hand-sewn and stuffed with wool. 

I WILL SELL ALL OF THEM!

Surprise!

Apologies for the lack of updates lately. It's been hectic here, but I have good news! I found a part-time job and I've stumbled upon an amazing new dye!

Take a gander at this:

Oh yes. That stunning pink, purple, and turquoise is from beans! I noticed the water my beans were soaking in was becoming coloured, so I tossed in a few pieces of unmordanted cheesecloth and silk. Some samples were later treated with dish soap, others, with vinegar. I wrapped a sample around my favourite rusty anchor and the colours shifted to grey purples.

Ah, lovely. I'm not sure how colourfast beans are as a dye, but I can't wait to test it! This method uses no heat and the beans are safe to boil and eat since I'm not using a mordant.  

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. 

Surprising Results

While my noggin is taking a beating from this fierce head cold, I figured you should look at some things I've done! 

Above: pre-mordanting some wools and silk in an alum and tartar solution (note: the dye kitchen doesn't have a proper scale, so I had to eyeball the amounts), and in the pot on the right, a rose-hip dye extraction. This was from that demo...

I banged off a scarf in record time! All of these cotton scarves are blank canvases for dye experiments. If they turn out well, I'll sell 'em.

Below: dye experiments! Gorgeous, fascinating dye experiments! These two were coloured by horse chestnut hulls. The top photo, though out of focus, shows the samples after an iron post-mordant. LOOK AT THAT BLUE! 

And without iron, you get lovely champagne and nude tones. It's incredible that the colour shifted so drastically AND only on the cotton and silk! The cotton was pre-mordanted with milk and an ammonia solution. I am also testing cotton with a tannin solution, so we'll have to wait and see how effective it is. 

These next two photos show the rose hip bath. Similar nudes and champagnes, but wait till you see the results of the iron post-mordant...

TADA! BLUE! Logwood blue on cotton and silk! Amazing!

And here are all of those little samples lined up in my book. The colour's a bit off in the photo, but you get the idea. The horse chestnut blues are far more yellow than the purple blues from the rose hips. 

I need to spend some time in the BAC driveway collecting walnuts and horse chestnuts before they get carted off by squirrels or shredded by lawnmowers. 

Dye Jar Magic and Dharma Delivery

There are some nice pictures in this post if you can just make it through a bit of text...

I derive an immense amount of pleasure from working with natural dyes. Generally speaking, natural dyes are made from... natural substances, whether that be vegetable, animal, or mineral. For example, onion skins, dried cochineal insects, and rust are all natural dyes. Not all natural materials produce colour, not all colour is light fast. The colour obtained from a plant might (and usually doesn't) match the original colour of the plant itself. Some dyes require a mordant to fix the colour to the fibre, some dyes work better on some fibres than others, the pH of the water and trace chemicals/minerals can affect the colour, temperature and concentration and duration of the dyebath all affect colour as well. Then there's post processing, using nearly-exhausted baths, and other weird ways of getting colour to stick to the fibres... Ah! Wonderful, wonderful stuff.