burlap & eco dye fusion

There are all kind of weird ways to categorize people, one of them could be 1* people who pay their bills in time, never get late to a dinner party and always do as they plan. 2* people that don't. I for one belong in that second category. I don't feel that bad about it.

The 21th of July 2009 I bought this pattern, and only a few days ago I finally got around to make some. How about that? I had some eco dye fabric that was kind of insignificant, so I used it for the lining. The burlap is coffee sacks I got from my coffee pusher - Just Coffee - the best organic, fair trade coffee in the state of Denmark!

The coffee sacks comes from Mexico, my coffee pusher is american, the plants are local and so are the wool from which I spun the yarn in the bucket. It's kind of like the internet - it's a small world sometimes ...

Stitching & Mending

Ever so slowly, stitching and mending an old skirt back to life, using leftover and discarded scraps of silk fabric which has had a dip in the dye pot. Reusing. Repairing. Refashioning. Reviving.

  

Walnut Ink

I found some black walnuts in a cardboard box behind the house. If I remember rightly, someone gave them to me almost two years ago. They were quite shrivelled, but undoubtably still full of dye stuff. So I boiled them in some water a few hours, strained the soup through a piece of muslin - et voilá: walnut ink! Testing:

Printing with home made eraser stamp and walnut ink. There seem to be endless possibilities with this magical potion. I'll keep you posted!

Alder - Alnus glutinosa

A favourite tree of mine: Common Alder/Black Alder - or Rød-el as it's called in Denmark, which means Red Alder. I suppose the 'red' comes from the warm, glowing orange colour you can see when you've cut down a tree.

It's a fast growing species, and it often serves as a 'nursing tree' for slow growing trees like oak and beech. A protecting mama tree. I have Alder all around the border of my tiny woods, and when we cut down a tree to thin out (and make firewood), I have an infinite supply of dyeing material.

Bark, cones and leaves can be used for dyeing, and you don't need any mordants.

These samples are  Alder cones on silk, cotton, wool yarn and raw wool ...

 From top: cotton, linen and silk, soaked in iron water after dyeing with cones.

I had this wool knit cardigan for years without ever using it, it was a quite unbecoming pale lilac - for my fair complexion. After an Alder treatment de luxe it's now one of my favourites.

I'm going to try to make ink with the bark,  apparently the ink was formerly used in Norway to print on the hide side of lamb and sheep skin. You can see some examples of skin print here, not with Alder ink, though. If anybody have any experiences with Alder ink they'd like to share, I'd be delighted!

Spruce cones

Leaves have become dry and shriveled, or mushy and slimy - depending on weather and latitude - at least here in the northern hemisphere. Now we have to look for other plant materials for dyeing for a while. We don't have to look for long, though. Spruce are rather common in these parts of the world, and they are blessing us with loads of wonderful dyeing materials.

From top:

· cotton gauze

· wool yarn

· dupioni silk

· merino wool fabric

No mordants used for the peachy colour - the greys achieved by dipping in rain water made rich in iron with rusty nails. Which is also lying around on the ground, like the cones. People living in our house in former times found it convenient to dump their garbage in the garden, so now I can pick up handfuls of rusty nails (as well as broken glass et cetera) years after.

According to my books spruce cones yield browns. Well, not this time they did. But I love the colours, so generously provided by my trees and ancestors. The grey is one of the best I've achieved, so rich and dark.

Have you got any spruce cone experiences you want to share?

Seeds

It seems I'll be able to grow Japanese indigo from my own organic seeds next year.

I got all kinds of different turqoise colours from this years crop. Perhaps I'll be able to make darker shades, or even indigo, next year.

Found a beautiful blog about growing japanese indigo. Apparently they put some of the harvested indigo plants in buckets of water to make the seeds mature. Must try that next year.

Japanese maple

Yes, I love everything japanese these days! I haven't got this beautiful tree in my garden, but had the luck to pass by a couple of trees which had made a thick, soft, ruby, leafy layer on a pavement. So I had to lie down in it, being total weird and an embarrassment to my daughter. - Well, actually I didn't really lie down - I grabbed a bag and stuffed it with incredibly glowing-red leaves. And stayed up half the night to wrap some of them in different kinds of fabric I had laying around.

cotton velours ...

 silk ...

cotton ...

wool ...

silk noil ...

 silk...

silk ...

left: wool, right: silk ...

I didn't use any additives, just wanted to see how different kinds of fibres would react to the leaves. Cotton turned out in cool green, brown and yellow shades. Wool warmer yellow, rust, peach and pink. And silk pink/brownish pink/peach-yellow-purple. Interesting.

I like to pin the fabrics to the walls to see how they look together. In the last photo there's an eucalypt experiment in the middle. I've started stitching something with some of the fabrics - will show you when finished.