Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Enjoying my freash flowers in silk!


I love the new colors that old traditional flowers are now developed in, not wanting to start a new garden I filled up the cauldron with them and moved the basils to another pot.



Purple cone (Echinacea) is now in wonderful oranges, raspberries, and yellows and blanket flower (gaillardia) is in apricots, yellows and red.



I've read purple basil make a wonderful dye if you can get it to bond with the fabric. The water will be full of dye, it will adhere to the pot and utensils  making it very hard to wash off but not the fabric.



So, I tried wrapping it up in the fabric (wool and silk) and steaming it. I steamed it a good hour, then left it sit over night, unwrapping it a couple of days later.



The color and print is beautiful on wool.



and on silk.



A couple of weeks later I picked more basil, it didn't look as colorful but I tried it anyway thinking the inside must still be full of color, but no this is what I got. Not good.



Next month I'm going to be teaching my Herb Society members about natural dyeing, we're all bringing flowers and wrapping them in silk scarves, then I will bring them home to steam for them. I've been dyeing some ahead of time to give them ideas of what to plants bring and how it will look.
This print was made with black-eye Susan's.



Burgundy blanket flowers,



Dyers chamomile,



of course eucalyptus,



and a mixture of blanket flower and dyers chamomile,



one of my favorites orange cosmos.


This is the beginning, with a few more to do before the meeting.



My water colors!



The hydrangea behind the studio are lush this year.



I love all the different shades of color. Too bad their not a useful dye color.



I caught this little fellow eating my Johnnie-jumps the other morning.



I wanted to share this with you, when one of my Herb Society members has a death in their family we bring them this arrangement of plants with special meanings:




Wednesday, July 6, 2016

A little bit of Lake Michigan woven into the loom



I spent a beautiful day at the beach with the grandkids,



it's a feast for all the senses.



On our beach walk the kids found this small piece of drift wood to add into the loom.



I first added 3 rows of cream wool to represent the beach sand.



Next came the water. Three rows of indigo blue and the drift wood, one collected by the grandkids and two from my girlfriend Deb C. (thank you all!)



The next body of water to be woven in will be part of the Mississippi (after our visit).
And the final large body of water will be the Pacific Ocean, using driftwood my girlfriend sent me from Alaska.

  • Deb Hardman
  • Allie Aller
  • Jenny Bowker Cairo
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