Thursday, September 3, 2015

golden greens



Just over three months have gone by since I posted here last, and wow it went so fast. I have been watching the garden grow and my boys too - trying to keep up with all of them - the boys and the garden. 

The late season bloomers in our yard are gearing up for their show. We have several varieties of native goldenrod, most abundantly - Solidago rigida.  It's not at all picky about soil or light or anything so has been a prolific self-seeder, so it seems the perfect choice for dyeing.





So far I have only used the stems and leaves with cottons and raw silk fabrics. No luck with the cotton, which was not surprising. The raw silk has been wonderful - celery green, pale yellow and most recently gold.



I tried painting with a bit of likely tannin-rich mud from our pond. It didn't affect the dye so much as just make a mud stain, but I like it. Like everything else, the mud preferred the silk. I am excited to work more with the mud. I love the raw nature in this process - making marks with wet dirt. On the silk it's kind of amazing really, and these are shown already machine washed and dried.

Before going much further with the dyeing I am thinking about what I would really use. At first I liked the greens, but that green and gold variation - especially in the middle block - is just beautiful.


Next try I will be working on repeating that.

I am also thinking about how beautiful these colors might be with walnut browns.

14 comments:

  1. beautiful!
    ah, we call this cross dyeing in the textile industry, often used to get a heathered effect when two fibers are spun together in the yarn or woven one in the warp and one in the fill. you can stitch with different fibers too so you might get a variation that way too.

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    1. Thanks, Jude...and that's a beautiful idea for the stitching. I don't have any silk thread so I will have to look into that. This whole silk thing is new to me, I have always been a little wary of it. This raw silk fabric has been nice to work with.

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  2. golden greens are lovely and a great starting point for other colors too. here, i get my golden greens from a cross between my pomegranate and my indigo. the gold of the pomegranate is amazing on silk- silk is my personal favorite. especially old silk.

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    1. I have not tried pomegranate yet - thank you! How does one find old silk? Vintage clothing?

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  3. Welcome back! Your dye trials and mud painting are wonderful. I will be excited to see where they take you.

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  4. your sense of colour and line is sublime

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    1. Thank you, Mo. I hope to use some of these colors to piece a base for the stitched linework that I love.

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  5. Thanks for showing the results of your experiments. I was so curious about what the mud would do. And I really like the different types of cloth stitched together before dyeing. Even if not much color happened on some, there is a certain underlying kinship from them being treated in the same way, taking the dye bath together. Yes--walnut! Black walnuts are starting to fall here.

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  6. silk is animal fabric and therefore dyes much better than plant textiles, there are more 'hooks' for the dye to cling on to....here endeth the dyeing lesson, my friend who studied chemistry informed me of the 'hooks', made it easy to visualise the process in my head; your results are stunning, beautiful! am excited about getting started with mud myself, as we have an abundance of that over here!

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  7. Well, the silk definitely has its' hooks in the mud. Thanks, Saskia! I look forward to seeing what you do.

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  8. Fabulous soft early autumnal colours.

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  9. Hi susan
    I just had a good visit through your last few posts. It was so nice to see the colour quilt with the red bud tree, and the oak leaves whirling.
    I agree with Mo that you have a sublime sense of colour and order. Lovely to see how you are able to use the traditional patterns passed down from earlier generations in such new ways with a truly contemporary feeling.
    I dyed some silk velvet with gunnera stalks last week - a tropical plant that grows wild under the cedars here in my yard. Anxious to see what you've been working on recently.
    xo

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    1. Judy, thanks so much for your message and encouraging words. You inspired me to post an update. I am so thrilled to know you visited here. I admire your work so much and recognize common threads of family and sense of time and making time to quilt in the midst of all that. So so good to hear from you. Looking forward to hearing about the gunnera fabrics over at your place.

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