#dye making

Time to make pigments! The neigbor has a mulberry tree that hangs over my driveway, so I eat the berries and then pick up the fallen ones off the ground to make into a lovely purple. Mulberries are pH dependant, I have made really nice purples from them, but if I push it alkaline I can get black. It is part of the reason they stain sidewalks black rather than purple, the anthocyanins react with the alkaline stone and turn black.

I love having a yard because now I can do my pigment making outside and it is so much easier. I want to get a small portable stove to boil anything that is smelly (like walnut husks and acorns, urg their smell kills my head) outside, and I need to build a shaded screen box to cover the drying pigments with to keep bugs out and protect from the sun.

I have cochineal and sappan next on the docket. Waiting on goldenrod to bloom, need to see if there is any invasive buckthorn around to harvest the berries from to make the original sap green and stil de grain. I have pokeberries growing in my yard but will not be making them into pigment again, the color is lovely, but it fades almost immediately and it smells SO BAD. Also poisonous I guess. I really hope my black hollyhock and coreopsis do something, but I am giving up hope.

The stinging nettles from my bear post! My research project for this season is historic methods of dye making, and because they don’t bother me too much if I touch them, I figured I’d gather up a bunch nettles that we’d have to clear out anyway and see what I can do with them and avoid my coworkers (who DO get bothered by them more) having to pull them up

been suffering a touch of the ol’ art constipation again. For some reason these value studies are really killin’ me, so here’s something else.