Cutch extract has a huge tannin content, making it almost universally useful to the natural dyer. It can be used both as a mordant and a dye. Cutch is an extract from the acacia tree, and it has almost as many applications as it has names: cutch, catechu, kath, seesiat, kasu, cacho, terra japonica…. The […]
In the summer, when all the plants stand tall, I usually collect good bundles of tansy, yarrow, and other wild dye plants. And they have to go before the next harvest. ~ My dyestuff stores from last year contained big bundles of mugwort and tansy, a smaller amount of yarrow, a box full of dry […]
What’s the collective noun for hats? “Herd”? “Flock”? “Mob”? “Head”? Or, in my case, “parliament”, or even “pandemonium” may even soon be appropriate. I can’t seem to stop knitting them. ~ I’ve been working on two new designs for hats, a lacy one that leapt out at me from a Japanese pattern dictionary, and one […]
The topic of my last post was failures in dyeing, and here’s more. First, my most serious and most annoying failure as a natural dyer. 3: Organic Indigo Failure A while back, I experimented a bit with an indigo vat with fructose, but my results were not very convincing, in the sense that the amount […]
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). […]
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 […]
This summer, I’ve been on a few nice forest walks, although I know it’s too early for mushrooms. Or it’s too early for mushrooms except the ones that grow on trees – I found several of those! Mushrooms that grow on trees are quite useful when the tree is dead, because they help decompose the […]
Remember these jars? They had been fermenting for over a week, and the color of the liquid didn’t change over the last days, so I decided it was time to try them. The front jar contains the pit and peel from 1 avocado and 1 Tsp salt, the other one the same with the addition […]