Have no fear, I am not going to comment except to say that I'm appalled. The anti-human right is rising and it is to everyone's detriment. Scott Morrison is described as an "evangelical Christian worshipping at a Hillsong style church" and I hereby renounce any description of myself which includes any of those words. gah.
I sometimes develop a mini obsession with some kind of traditional craft and for who knows what reason, this week it has been plant based dyes. The photo is one I "borrowed". The fabric has been dyed with avocado pits and the apples are a pretty accessory.
Who would have imagined avocado seeds would make a pink dye? how many avocado seeds would I need to save and how much guacamole could I eat? and what could I dye with this most delicate of colours?
Apparently camellias make a good dye but my husband cut down our old and beautiful camellia a few weeks ago (part of the great Feng Shui Project)
We also had a guava which might have produced some pretty red colours. Alas, it went the way of the camellia.
We still have an unruly rosemary bush which might be worth playing with and he can't touch the prolific lavender which hangs over from our neighbour's yard.
The plant dye mini obsession has taught me new words like "scour" (ok, I knew it but would usually use it in a "pot" context) and "mordant" (word has it that soy milk makes a good mordant, helping dye stick to fibre) and I'm itching to try creating some pretty, softly dyed bits & pieces but what? and with what?
Unlike the cheese phase, the pesto project, fermentation and sprout growing I might have to leave avocado pip colour creations on the undone list.........
Oh Kylie. I think you missed a window of dyeing opportunity with the ' lupin' hill of beans.
ReplyDeleteDo you have a nearby library where you can access a computer until one falls out of the sky :)
Alphie
haha! if only i had thought of plant dyes earlier!
DeleteI could use a library computer but it's easier to just wait for my daughter to go to work then snaffle her lap top :)
She's been snowed under with assignments and not working much but that will change after today.....
Lovely to see a post from you. The only good thing I can say about our new PM is that he is not (quite) Dutton. I despair. And if they remove us from the Paris Agreement I will rage.
ReplyDeleteBack to much nicer things. Avocado produces a lovely soft pink colour? Who knew. Onion produces a soft ochre. I do hope you can explore this idea some more (so I can enjoy it vicariously).
hmmmm.....om inspection of my wardrobe i have two linen shirts i wear rarely....maybe i could re-colour them
Deletethinking........
"Who would have imagined avocado seeds would make a pink dye?" exactly my thought!
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of plants which produce yellow and brownish colours but pinks are harder to find.
DeleteOne more piece of information about the avocado stones. Thank you. In case you are wondering, the other is https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/10/crush-your-avocado-stone-with-your-weak-avocado-hands-and-eat-it-millennials-7219588/
ReplyDeleteSounds like hard work, to me!
DeleteHarris Tweed was traditionally dyed with dyes found from plants etc readily available on the Islands and the mordant used was urine. I thought you'd like to know that!
ReplyDeleteNow, see, I do want to know that! Urine is free and available, if it works it may be the perfect Morant.
DeleteAs I wrote this post I realised that kilt colours would have all been natural dyes of some sort. Interesting
*mordant
DeleteAuto correct is death to the language
So you have to keep busy to keep some of the political craziness out of your head but stay active and influence government to to do the right thing.
ReplyDeleteEvery time I write to a politician I get a meaningless answer. Maybe other means are needed!
DeleteI don't have any clothes that need dying, actually the opposite, I have some that need the unwanted dye removed. I didn't realise that an avocado had seeds, I thought it was just that big stone in the middle. :D
ReplyDeleteI can't see you in anything but bright colours.... And black, lots of black
DeleteI accidentally did some plant dying the other week - Lily pollen for bright yellow blobs on white linen!
ReplyDeleteSx
Oh dear! Lilies are totally worth it, though!
DeleteAt least your new prime minister has a lovely accent, but of course you might not even be aware that he has an accent given that all of youse guys talk more or less alike, at least to my untrained ear. I know that when I lived in America's Deep South, I didn't know that everyone down there had an accent. I just thought we talked normally, which is why, when I was a kid, I would call long distance information just to listen to the Yankee operators.
ReplyDeleteI'm pleased you like our PM's accent but you are right, he sounds like pretty much everyone else. We do have some small variations in accents here, the poor and uneducated often sound different to the better off but it is not guaranteed.
DeleteI can fall into a deeply vernacular way of speaking which gives my mother the shivers :)
A shame about the camellia and the guava. I would never cut down any of our bushes without Jenny's agreement. She absolutely objects to any pruning of our eucalyptus tree, so it's now quite enormous!
ReplyDeleteI've never dyed anything in my life. I'm sure that if I tried I would get dye over every adjacent surface.
I used to love seeing possums come to steal guavas and losing those trees is sad but some people just don't know what's good.
ReplyDeleteDye does always spread everywhere but plant dyes are less intense so I figure they could be more forgiving
My ex once pulled out all of my perennials thinking they were dead - I was letting them go to seed!! But that's not why he's my ex, that's a much longer story! :)
ReplyDeleteOh no! then you missed out on free plants next year!
DeleteI think that "ex stories" are either very long or ridiculously short, depending on the day :)
How interesting - I hope if you do more of this you will let us know. I expect that natural dyes would be more environmentally kind than the packaged ones. I've often wished to dye clothing but I won't put those dyes down the drain.
ReplyDeleteI dyed a few things when I was a lot younger and didnt think twice about the chemicals down the drain. Thank heaven we have moved on from that!
DeleteI have a wee project in the early stages, it will be interesting to see how it goes. Watch this space!
Co-incidentally, I was just watching a TV programme called "Coast". On The Isle of Harris in Scotland we were shown how natural dyes are derived from the landscape to dye wool which is later used in the manufacture of Harris Tweed cloth. I was briefly fascinated.
ReplyDeleteI assume their were coastal views in this tv program?
DeleteTextiles and the coast sounds a little like heaven.....