Urban Foraging

Today I explored an undeveloped hillside by my house, and found that it was absolutely overgrown with blackberries and tansy. Double score!

The blackberries will become more jam. More jam! All the jam! I will dye yarn with the tasty.

I left plenty of berries for the birds, and lots of flowers for the bees. Even in the city, the land bears wonderful treasures. I will harvest these with gratitude, using the gifts of the earth to feed my body and soul.

Solstice

Happy Solstice! Or happy belated Solstice, I should say. Obviously I am posting this on Monday and it is no longer Solstice. The days have already started getting shorter.

But I do want to tell you about how I welcomed summer this year because it was quite lovely. I am more of a cool weather type person, but summer does have its good points. For instance: lots of light and many growing things.

Saturday I tended my garden, played outside with my son, harvested dye plants, finished my Sunlight Shawl for Sad People (I've got it blocking right now), and ate strawberries straight out of the garden. Perfection!

Sunday I spent cleaning my house and dyeing yarn. I have two wonderful pieces of news: the fig tree in my yard is healthy and growing and had lots of leaves to use for dyeing,  AND whatever was eating all my figs in years past has apparently moved on - there are still a ton of figs left and I'm not counting my chickens before they hatch but it looks like we might get a harvest this year!

I don't have a fancy camera, and unfortunately I had trouble capturing the color with my camera phone, but the fig leaves with alum and iron yielded a very cool variegated spring green and mossy green.

Gray Ivy

Sunday I spent the day dyeing, preserving herbs from my garden, and working on a sweater. I also watched American Hustle, which was very good.

I dyed yarn with Ivy berries that I picked throughout the neighborhood, with an iron mordant solution added directly to the dyebath. It turned out a nice medium warm gray. Mordants are so magic to me. Adding a mineral to plant matter can shift and in some cases (like ivy berries, which yields yellow without the addition of iron) change the color altogether.

If you're interested in learning more about the iron solution, I got the recipe from the wonderful We Will Tell You All Of Our Secrets blog.

Making potions with poison berries and rust seemed like something Snow White's evil stepmother might have done, which I liked.

As I was dyeing, I was overcome with an intense feeling of gratitude for the women who preserved the knowledge of natural dyeing - the women who, when the world said "this knowledge is obsolete" answered "no, this knowledge is valuable." The women who kept their legacy, and passed it down to those who were willing to receive it.

♥♥♥♥

These skeins dyed with logwood and madder are drying on my porch right now! 

Some of it is variegated!

Black Bean Dye!

Isn't it just the best when you can make use of something that would usually be thrown away? It's like discovering a treasure under your bed or something.

Today's treasure is the water that turns all bluish dark color when you soak dried black beans overnight. The beans become dinner and the soaking water becomes a dye bath.

I had seen pictures of other people's black bean dyed yarns, and so I was expecting mine to come out as a member of the blue family. However, natural dyes do not always play by my rules. They play by the rules of science, which can sometimes seem indistinguishable from the rules of magic.

Hence, my yarn came out a purplish brownish color. It looks brown in some lights, and rather lavender in others. It's quite pretty, but I will continue to play with heat, mordants and ph, and I'm sure I will get the black beans to do many more things.

Horsetail

Horsetail! It's everywhere! It makes sense that it's so abundant, it's a survivor - it's been around since 100 million years before there were dinosaurs! Super cool!

It is also a useful herb and dye plant - and its abundance (some consider it a weed) makes it a great plant for sustainably-minded dyers and herbalists to forage without worry of negative environmental impact. Just make sure to harvest when the leaves have spread out in their characteristic tail-like formation; that means that they have had a chance to release their pollen.

Horsetail yeilded a nice soft brown in my dye pot, and it is also a welcome addition to my teapot.

Horsetail is rich in silicon, which is good for skin, bones, blood vessels and connective tissue. Add small amounts of the stems and leaves of horsetail (harvested in a clean area) to tea blends or soups to reap the benefits of this amazing plant!

(However, horsetail is not recommended for people who are pregnant or nursing or have kidney disease)

Dyeing with Scotch Broom

I dyed yarn with Scotch Broom! Scotch Broom is absolutely everywhere around here - it's invasive so it's a perfect plant to harvest and use for dying.

I pre-mordanted the yarn in alum.

It yielded a soft, cheerful yellow. I'm going to give it to my sister for her birthday - she is a knitter also and was with me when I harvested the Scotch Broom. No one tell her though; it's a surprise! 

Day of lovely things

Today my sister Owl and I took a mini road trip to Tolt Yarn and Wool. What a wonderful shop! I want to stay there all the time. They have such a great selection of hand dyed and small-producer yarns! The staff are also really great - so friendly and really exited to talk about yarn. It's really a very special place.

I got 3 skeins of Yoth - two big sister and one little brother,  a skein of Twirl Petals, a skein of Madelinetosh Pashmina, and a skein of Hazel Knits lively dk.

I can't wait to get these babies on some needles! Wheeeee!

After our trip to Tolt we explored some woods and foraged some scotch broom, horsetail and nettles. The scotch broom and horsetail are destined for my dye pots, and the nettles went home with Owl for her soup pot. There were carpets and carpets of horsetail that weren't quite ready to harvest, but I guess that's a good excuse to head back out to Carnation before too long!