I finished my Vindauga baby blanket, and it turned out just the way I’d imagined it. In order to break the clean lines a bit, and make the blanket more baby-ish, I decided to use a picot cast-off instead of the usual one. But it turned out to be a problem to find one that […]
Ever since I first read about Saxon blue, produced by reaction indigo with concentrated sulfuric acid, I’ve really wanted to try it. The lawyer Johann Christian Barth is credited with inventing the Saxon blue reaction in 1743. He treated natural indigo with sulfuric acid, then known as “oil of vitriol”. According to de Keijzer, the […]
I’ve recently completed lots of projects, and begun even more new ones. Spring energy, maybe? Over Easter, I had to study for an exam. I do find it theoretically interesting that you can describe populations of animal and plants mathematically (that’s population ecology) but ultimately, I do prefer to move about freely outdoors and collect […]
Green is a difficult color to achieve with natural dyes. One might initially think that it was easy, given that green is the predominant color in nature. That’s not the case, since the green color of plants comes from chlorophyll, which doesn’t work as a natural dye (since it’s soluble in fat, not in water). […]
Dyer’s polypore is one of the very good dye mushrooms found here in Denmark (and many other places, including the rest of Europe and North America). It grows on dead wood, or parasitically on the roots of living trees. It grows in the same spot year after year, and grows a new fruiting body every […]
2015 is history, and it’s now 2016, but I think there’s just time to show you my mushroom dyeing of 2015, which brought a quite nice mushroom harvest. Fall is my favorite time of year. Always has been. It’s the colors, the scents, and the long forest walks. We go to the same plantation in […]
My big blanket made of test skeins is done – I’m so happy with the way it turned out!! Here is the entire blanket. I know you can’t tell from such a photo, but it’s quite large, 96 x 150 cm (38 x 59 inches). And a couple of closer views. I took lots […]
Quite a while ago, I knit this little pincushion, the physical evidence of my experiments with an organic indigo vat. It’s knit in Fenris 100% wool, 450 m/100 g. The pattern is free, Peerie Pin Cushion by Ellen Kapusniak. You’re supposed to sew it together, but I, of course, grafted it closed. I normally use […]
This summer, I grew Japanese indigo and woad in the garden for the first time. I harvested all of my plants on September 28th (already a long time ago, lots of stuff has been going on here) except the woad plants I left to let them grow a second year in an attempt to get […]
Madder red has been used by humans for millennia. Or, as someone much more eloquent that me put it: “Madder’s diary goes back as far as history’s earliest written pages” (Brian Murphy in “The Root of Wild Madder”). Whenever I dye with madder, and stop to really think about its history, I’m quite fascinated. Yes, […]