dyeing with crowberries while on holiday (dye with krækiber)

Last minute i packed some of my favourite yarn (Empire, a 2 ply merino from Morris & Sons) with the idea that i maybe  could get a chance to do some dyeing while i was in Reykjavik. So when i went berry picking for the wild blueberries i also picked a pot of crowberries. Nice and black the berries.....i was hoping for something quite dark to come out.......
                                                                krækiber 

into the pot with the lot:

looking lovely and purpley and getting darker and darker......

actually what went into the pot was a bit more than the empire 2 ply. I bought some local wool:  'lovestory',  made from icelandic wool which has two fibres (and is a bit scratchy next to the skin, but it very light to wear as it is super warm)

The long coarse hair of the outer layer,'tog', repels water. The inner layer is 'þel' which is shorter, softer and fluffier.

Love story is lace weight (1 ply) made by Hélène Magnússon, (check out her web site)

so here is what i got:the photos are pretty close to the real colours too

blues through to lavender

from the left the darkest denim blue had the longest time through to the lighter blues that had shorter times in the pot. I put a couple of hanks from the pot in a plastic container and tucked it under the bed for a week and then reheated them over night to get the darkest blue. The blues are really lively and vibrant.

(the lighter lavender blue on the far right is the lovestory sample)

from my dyeing experiments i have realised that the superwash treated wools take up the colour with greater intensity and as i am obsessed with lace weight wools i've found the Empire 2 ply merino really suits my aim of creating an extensive set of colours and shades of colours suitable for embroidery.

i made a pie with bláber

bláber & krækiber

here it is, the pie-tart that i made from wild blueberries picked on the hills near reykjavik (on the way to seltun geothermal patch). I was airbnb-ing at Konni's place in sept last year.

• butter & a cup of flour & dash of water to make pastry (i just guessed the quantities), crumbed together by hand
• rolled with a bottle and pressed into a flan tin
• blind baked 'til light golden on edges
• meanwhile, cooked some jonagold apples with some cinnamon
• lightly cooked half kilo blueberries with 2 teasp brown sugar

then put it all together, sprinkled a few fresh berries on top and cooked it some more 'til pastry browned nicely on the edges

it tasted FANTASTIC with some cream dribbled over. sweet & tart and really fruity. seconds all around and it was all gone!

i spent a couple of hours picking blueberries (bláber) and also the very abundant crow berries (krækiber).  sadly, the crow berries don't taste of anything very much but there are heaps of them every where. the blueberries are a little more tart than our cultivated ones, as you would expect, but nothing beats rambling around picking and eating them wherever you are in the country side.......

This was my main blue berry picking patch. A lovely sunny day to lie down in the heather and watch the clouds and the cars of tourists stop by the lakeside. No one else wandered up the hill at all, which was why there were so many berries to pick even though this place is only 10 mins from the main road on a popular tourist trail.

the blueberries went into the pie, (or directly into my mouth) and the crow berries were used for a dyeing experiment. This will be my next post, all about eco dying with the black crow berries in Konni's kithchen.......(he was away for this experiment, so was not alarmed!)

finally posting something again

Just to get started again, i'll post some pictures of drill rig pits with nice patterns. Haven't done any drilling work this past year, so these are older shots. Anyway, pits are being replaced by the above ground tank system, so viewing the action is becoming not so easy or interesting.

metallic sheen on the bubbles: we've hit a coal horizon

nice low angled sun effect

the bubbles look like ball bearings rolling on metal sheeting here

a nice blobby effect, i think the picture is sideways.....

coal horizon, in the runoff channel to the pit

out of the coal

more channel swirls

i kept putting off posting as my pictures of the dying experiments don't really show the right colours. So, i'' probably just start anyway and post a lot about the this and that of the last year to unblock the pipe....visited clare in auckland in autumn...... i went to iceland with karen and stella in september. And then to uganda in october to visit the school that we raise funds for. the kids are gorgeous of course.

Natural Dyeing with mistletoe and prunus leaves

On our playdays we have started experimenting with dyeing fabric and wool using leaves, flowers and twigs that we collect around about......mostly in Sydney but i have bought back stuff from my fieldwork area as well.

I've become obsessed with dyeing 1 & 2ply bought wool yarns, as i don't farm sheep or spin, (yet!). (The ply rating is an australian term, equivalent to lace weight and cobweb elsewhere, which i find too vague).

The wool and silk dye beautifully, but its all quite variable depending on the type of wool fibre, how it has been prepared, when the dye material is collected and how long the dyeing process is. This means that pretty much every batch is different to some degree.

                  Fascinating.
                                         Endless fun.
                                                                  Bucket chemistry.

I do label everything, but otherwise it's all slapdash at this stage because it's fun that way.

I have been trying to make good photos that show the true colours, but so far it doesn't work with the point-and-shoot very well. These photos are the best i've come up with.


Ist mistletoe experiment

Mistletoe, dry fallen leaves collected in autumn

The mistletoe is common alongside the road from Barraba to Bingara in NSW. Barraba is where Merlene has her Fibre Shop (see the earlier posts about that). At this stage in the experiments I'm only using an alum mordant, sometimes with cream of tartar. I'm also using rainwater from the parents' concrete tank, which might be neutral or ever so slightly alkaline, and doing the simmering in stainless steel pots. The mistletoe leaves were a dark red/brown like the colour of the wool, so this one worked very well! It was the 3rd simmer for this hank, with the pot topped up with some 'fresh' leaves each time. Morris & Son Empire 2ply, 100% merino.

2nd mistletoe experiment

I then collected more mostly fresh leaves in late winter/early spring. The leaves looked lovely - bright red in the sunshine, so i was very hopeful.......into the pot they went, but i got some different results!

Mistletoe, mostly fresh early spring leaves

Firstly note the change of colour in the bottom hank compared to the image above of the same. That's the problem with the colour reproduction. i think the real colour is actually somewhere between the two.

• the top hank is alum + cream of tartar, Beautiful Silks 1 ply merino, 1 simmer
• the middle hank is alum + C of T, Dairing 2ply merino, 2nd simmer
• bottom hank is the one from the first experiment to show the relative differences

Mistletoe samples showing the range of colours

 This picture shows more of the range of colours from all the various combinations of wools and leaves and simmers.....

• the one on the far left is Icelandic einband and the colour is a very clear bright yellow. it was almost fluro when it came out of the pot! i'll get more of this on my next trip, even though it is probably closer to our 4ply weight i love it for its texture.

Experiments with prunus leaves

The dark purple flowering plum is quite popular as a street tree in various parts of sydney. I've collected batches from 3 differnt places during the last spring season and so far and they all give different results...... sadly only a few reasonably representative photos so far. The colours range from the almost grey- prussian blue below, through the lighter grey-mauve to delicious bluey-greens that i haven't been able to capture yet in the photos.i'll keep trying.

Prunus, purple leaves collected in spring

• The outside hank is Empire 2ply with leaves from the trees in Sun Valley in the Blue Mountains were my sister lives
• the centre hank is the remainder of the einband in the same pot
• both with alum & C o T.

Other plants
I have lots of purple-leaved plants in my garden and have started using alternathera, ipomea, purple tradescantia and in September i collected indigofera australis from Mum's new native plantings.I'll try the recipe that can be found in the Turkey Red Journal.

i've also got some stunning very strong rusty oranges from a grey-leafed ironbark. The pale bluey-grey-green leaves give a really outstanding colour and a lovely smell to the wool. When boiling the leaves the eucalyptus smell goes through the whole house. yummy.

Other plants used include grevillea robusta flowers (gave a yellow), illawarra flametree flowers (vibrant red flowers gave only a very soft buttery colour). Purple onion skins gave a greeny colour.

isn't rust lovely?

another post already!! AMAZING!!! but not really all that big...

 i was trawling through some of my old photos and noticed a few nice rusty things with lovely textures and colours. so here they are for your eyes' delight:

a 44 gallon drum from a property, far western NSW

my rust dye experiment using 'bus sticks' sitting on Rhonda's eco dyed silk

bit of an old tractor from near Mudgee

bit of an old thing, Borganess

wonderful spider rust on an old skip, Borganess

A visit to a starkly beautiful place

Occasionally very nice things come your way.....i got to go on a trip for work to China to look at dimesion stone projects. This is the rock that gets used for buildings: marble for benchtops, granites for wall panels and that sort of thing. Chinese people have feelings for dimension stone and they use it beautifully. We could learn heaps from them.

We went to 2 truly outstanding provinces. The first was nearish to the 3 Gorges area (but not too close!) so the mountains were luscious and the river valleys very scenic indeed. Growing wild on the farms are the plants people now garden with: wild hydrangeas for example, campanulas, windflowers etc etc etc. ( If the quarry doesn't come off, the locals should run garden enthusiast tours!)

The 2nd place is up in the north: DunHuang. On the silk road. On the edge of the desert country. Like an oasis. In some ways it reminded me of Mildura of all places - lots of sand surrounding and blowing into the small city, but grapes growing all through the housing areas and crops of melons and greens. the local red grapes are ENORMOUS and very tasty......

Here is a view of one of the places we drove to, about 2hrs out of the city into an arid landscape that is a geology-mapping paradise: looks like 100% exposure, eh? and dykes run all over the place. The ground surface is actually frost shattered rock so it's not quite 100% exposure, but close....i'm loading the pictures on my flickr page bit by bit,

but here is a taster of this  fascinating landscape (sadly i could only take my little point'n'shoot camera and a lot of shots are from a moving car on really bumpy track....)

i wanna go back......with my camera and stay for a week. it's enthralling. the colours.........find the flickr link and browse :
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alicole-sydney/albums

The Project - an update

Having foolishly said i would attempt to do one embroidery a week i promptly put the project down and have done very little on it. I am working on the next image now....but it could be a long time before there are any results.......

following are some of the ones i have finished (almost) so far:

the girls from the street fashion parade in Reykjavik, tidied up

the next ones are from my photos from the Senckenberg (Naturmuseum Senckenberg) in Frankfurt: hello Karen! Hello Stella!

A couple of very good looking beetles from the insect display and the top image is a wonderful dinosaur from the gallery

I've done these embroideries on off white silk organza with black thread

And now we get onto my first tries at the Icelandic part of the story: some of the gorgeous flowers growing along the canyon edge at Dettifoss. two different versions trialling the leaf contribution.......not sure which one i prefer......i might have to do one with no leaves at all, just the daisies scattered