Spring plant dye: Horsetail

Now that spring is well underway, I have a steadily increasing amount of different plants to try as dyes.  There is a shallow ditch running along the road frontage of my family’s acreage that is filling in with horsetails.  By horsetails, I ‘m not talking about the last part of Secretariat to cross the finish line, these horsetails are Equisetum arvense, a bright green, stiff, spindly, primitive plant.  The Equisetums are fascinating plants, “closely allied to the prehistoric order of the Calamitales, large and abundant treelike plants of the Carboniferous period nearly three hundred million years ago.”  (Boughton Cobb, A Field Guide to Ferns and their Related Families, Houghton Mifflin, 1963, p. 194)  Horsetails may be used for dyeing, here is the result:

 

A nice light tint of yellow green on the cottons, a bit darker on the silk.  I added a bit of alkaline modifier in the form of wood ash solution to one pot, and it seemed to lighten the color.  I’ve given up on weighing and measuring like most of my sources suggest.  Rough visual estimates are working fine for me, and if a batch of fabric doesn’t turn out, I’ll just try it again with a new dyebath. 

 

The sprigs in the picture that look like pine needles are the horsetail plant.

I’ve always had a deep appreciation for the natural world, I spent summers as a youngster tagging along with my mother to her job at a natural history museum.  Now that I am living on rural acreage, I am reacquainting myself with the wild flora and fauna.  While I was harvesting horsetails for dyeing, I was reminded of Albrecht Durer’s Great Piece of Turf watercolor from 1503.  The longer I concentrated on a square foot of meadow edge, I found more and more different plants.  Tip of the day: Never completely strip an area of a plant you are collecting, only take a fraction of what is there, and collect only if there is an abundance of what you seek.  Of course, don’t trespass either!

New venture

I will be a vendor at a craft show at Deerassic Park Education Center/National Whitetail Deer Education Foundation on May 30.  I believe that the show is a fundraiser for their education programs.  The venue is near Cambridge, Ohio, across from the main entrance to Salt Fork State Park on Route 22. 

I've been planning on developing a art/craft show line of small, affordable finished items, useful things.  So far, I have a selection of small purses and whole lot of "picnic kits" - quilted placemats with side pockets for silverware.  The placemats roll up and tie into a neat bundle and tuck nicely into a picnic basket, backpack or lunch bag.  They would also be great for anyone who takes a lunch to work.  I might take a small selection of fabric cuts to the show, though the focus will be finished work.  I'll have some art wall hangings too.

Fredericktown Quilters' Market

I had a bit of a milestone today in my little fiber arts business venture.  I had my debut as a vendor at a quilt show.  The event was a nice, small show in Fredericktown, OH.  I even managed to sell some things!  Thank you to those of you who made purchases from me, and thanks even more if you made it as far as to look up this blog.  I learned a lot from this first show, and I really appreciated talking to everyone who stopped by my table.  I received some good ideas on post topics, so please keep checking back.

Here is a view of my table:

The show was held in the multipurpose room of a high school; the Rachel's banner on the wall was NOT part of my set up.  Here's a bit of interesting trivia - apparently Fredericktown is where the iconic FFA (Future Farmers of America) jacket first appeared. 

My fabric in Cincinnati

If you are in the greater Cincinnati area, you will find a small selection of my hand dyed fabric at Silk Road Textiles in the College Hill neighborhood.  I just replenished the supply there; more vintage damask squares and Creativity Packs - assortments of small cuts of fabric and matching trims and embellishing fibers.  Visit Silk Road's website

Hungry Squirrels

The squirrels in my area had to share their stash of acorns and black walnuts with me this winter.  Believe me, what I collected for my fabric dyeing was miniscule compared to what I left behind for the wildlife.  Here’s how my first attempts at natural dyes turned out:

 

The cottons didn’t take the dyes too well, some of the literature on natural dyes hints at that.  The silk organza though, really soaked it up.  I definitely want to try more silks in the future, and wool fabric as well.  I have been peeling lichen off of my firewood, and I think I just about have enough to try a small batch of fabric.  I have also been picking up fallen wild cherry branches, and have them soaking in water for a dye session soon.  The wild cherry is supposed to yield pink tones.  The lichen, I have no idea as to possible color, but I know that it can be used as a dye.

Let It Snow!

We finally got some snow last week, so I jumped on starting some snow dyeing.  It is a simpler process than other dye methods.  I first learned of the technique from a fellow member of Contemporary Quilt and Fiber Artists.  One could also use ice cubes for this dye method but snow is plentiful in Ohio and free!  A helpful article on the process is “Dye Your Own Iced Parfait” by Carol Ludington, Quilting Arts, June/July 2011. 

I made up three main color blends this time; my “Painted Desert” blend, a red-violet/yellow-orange shade/green blend and a brown/yellow shade/green/red-orange blend.  I have made up two variants of each basic blend.  As the snow melts down into the layers of fabric, I can see some areas where the dyes are blending with each other, and other places where the dyes are separating into other colors.  I’ve had a lot of purples separate into blues and red-violets in this slow process.  Not that it is a bad thing, the varied separation and blending creates some wonderful, unexpected surprises.  Here’s a view of the snow and dyed covered fabric.  Yes, there really is fabric in there.

 

Back in college, I had the opportunity to work with raku fired ceramics, something I miss doing and would like to do again.  The snow or ice dyeing process is very similar to certain concepts that I loved with raku: lack of direct control of results, seemingly random results, extreme temperatures, and a lot of unsuccessful pieces.  Well, the high rate of loss wasn’t really something I loved so much, but it was a strong lesson in dealing with mistakes and loss, things to carry though in all aspects of life.  The iridescent colors or crackling in the raku glazes depended on how quickly the pieces made it into the sawdust reduction, whether or not any combustible material touched the glaze, and how long the red-hot pieces were allowed to smoke and slowly cool.  The shock of being pulled out of a red hot kiln causes many pieces to break.  With snow dyeing, I often get a moderate amount of fabric that doesn’t get dye distributed nicely.  There are often large areas of still white fabric.  The nice thing about fabric, I can always re-dye it again, and fabric doesn’t crack or break.  Unlike the heat of raku firing, snow dyeing obviously goes to the other extreme.  I have been running out in single digit temperatures to gather snow to top my buckets of fabric.  Once in a while, the color blends just don’t work out, and then, there isn’t much to do to save it.

 

The buckets get set aside for about 24 hours, until the snow melts.  These look promising:

 

Then comes rinsing out, and washing with Synthrapol.  I can get a fairly good feel for how the fabric is turning out as I rinse, but it still transforms to a certain degree while it goes through a wash cycle or two, then drying.  This batch looks like a success:

 

Do I have to sell these?  I want to use them myself!

Marvelous Mugs

Never underestimate what an entry to an art show challenge may bring out in yourself.  The guild I recently joined has a small annual show every November, in conjunction with Cambridge, Ohio’s Dickens Village.  They had a theme for the show – “Mug Madness.”  The explanation, direct from the call for entries was; “A mug is many things, a large drinking cup or the face of a person or pet.  Get creative with faces and think outside the mug.” 

I’m not into doing portraits, but I felt compelled to put something in the show to support the guild, especially since I am a new member.  So, I tried my hand at making a 3-D, non-functional fabric mug.  I dug around in my box of scraps and found two rectangular pieces of wool onto which I had felted roving, thread, yarns and fabric bits while I was learning to use my needle felting machine.  The two pieces were just about right for the bodies of two mugs, one large and one smaller.  I matched the pieces up with some of my hand dyed damasks, and started cutting and stitching.  Within the evening, I had two cylinders of fabric.  With added handles, they looked somewhat like mugs.  Off they went to the show.   

 

This was an all media show.  Drawings, and paintings dominated.  The piece that I thought was the best in the show was a dramatic oil or acrylic portrait of a man (I do believe he was portrayed drinking from a mug, thereby capturing both aspects of the theme), done in white and grays on a black background.  There were a couple of nice ceramic mugs.  I was surprised that there were not more ceramic entries, considering the clay history of this region and the number of active potters in the area.   

To my great surprise, my goofy little green fabric mug, made out of scraps and my imagination, was selected the first prize winner in the adult division!  My little mugs were the only textile art in the show.  I’d like to think that I opened some eyes to what is possible with fabric, and encouraged others to stretch themselves creatively.