Hometown loveliness

I was recently home for an extended visit, and there is much to share, much of it relatively mundane.  However, those who know me, know that I find the mundane delightful. While I am happily not homesick living in London, there are so many things I do miss about home, and Hamilton, not the least of which are friends and family. It is a bit of an old chestnut, but it is the little things you miss most, such as checking on the progress of the vegetable garden in spring - where in my mother's garden, the cherry tree is in bloom, and rhubarb is ready for picking, and making into little galettes!

 The rhubarb tarts were my contribution to a lovely gathering with friends which served as farewell party to Jenna, a member of the Beehive who is leaving us for an exciting life in the country. Inevitably, we always end up eating a lot of cheese at such gatherings, but no one ever complains about this. We were hoping for a picnic, and though the weather did not favour us, I think we did pretty well indoors! A particular highlight:  manchego cheese paired with Hollie's preserved apricots!

I was happy to be able to drop by craft night at Needlework, two of my dear fellow Bees new business venture, a sew-by-the-hour fabric shop.  With the place was buzzing all evening long, with people working on their projects, Needlework is fast becoming the nerve centre of the Hamilton DIY community!  It gave me a chance to catch up, and shall I say, even conspire, with a few friends on future projects.

My dear friend Georgie's mother, who keeps chickens at her Greensville home, was kind enough to drop by with two dozen of the most beautiful eggs I have ever seen.  One of the very special things about Edwina's eggs, besides their flavour and wonderful colour is how she marks each egg in pencil with the date she collected them - so you know which eggs to use first.  Simple brilliance. The blue/green shells of some of the eggs were too beautiful to put on the compost heap, so I have saved them, and begun collecting them in jars. They will keep my small collection of bird's nests company. 

While in Toronto, installing my work at Harbourfront Centre, I visited my favourite lakeside spot.  I used to spend my lunch hours here during my residency in the craft studio.  I love this vantage point of Toronto Island at all times of year, but winter time might be my preferred season, when the shore is at its most quiet.

My last day before returning to London could not have been lovelier (aside from packing anxiety) as my friend Michelle treated me to a lovely walk at the arboretum of Royal Botanical Gardens and through the trails leading to Cootes Paradise.  These trails form part of the Bruce Trail, Canada's oldest and longest footpath, which traces the length of the Niagara Escarpment.

The woods in spring were brimming with life:  redbud trees in bloom, may apples, and trilliums.  We passed by beaver lodges, and this adorable little chipmunk. Sometimes I need a reminder that we in Hamilton are living in the midst of real paradise.

Dinner to Dye For

 Two weeks ago, on a beautiful spring Sunday, along with some charming ladies from Chelsea, I attended the spring edition of a Dinner to Dye For, a workshop hosted by Here Today Here Tomorrow, a London-based a collaborative and experimental shop/studio showcasing sustainable fashion and accessories. Dinner to Dye For is a project of the Permacouture Institute, a San Fransisco and London-based educational organisation for regenerative design in fashion and Textiles.  The workshop was hosted by the lovely Katelyn Toth-Fejel, Emma Rigby and Anna-Maria Hesse.

The workshop took place in the gardens of Hackney City Farm, a bucolic oasis in east London.  Dinner to Dye For is part dye workshop, part celebratory meal, both based on seasonal foraged plants.  The dyes used were dock (sorrel) root, nettle and onions skins, and rhubarb leaves, used as a mordant.  We made shibori bundles of strips of silk and wool using shaped wooden blocks.  It was truly lovely to share an afternoon of good company and getting one's hands dirty.

 

The part of the day I enjoyed most was the meal, which was delicious and fresh: rosehip fizz cocktails, stinging nettle and sussex slipcote cheese crostini with sorrel butter, beet with red onions, mint and horseradish cream, nettle spaetzle with chickpea fritters, and for desert lemon pots with poached rhubarb - a spring feast!

  

All the food was amazing, and made me think back to childhood suppers at my grandparents farm, where we often ate foraged foods - spring salads of dandelion leaves, fiddleheads and sorrel.  Stinging nettle grows in abundance at their farm, and as children, we definitely had painful brushes with it, but I do not recall eating it.  I will now!  The rosehip fizz cocktail, in particular was a revelation which I cannot quite describe, but suffice to say, I will be attempting to recreate it for myself.

Stitching and Drawing

My natural dye research is deeply based in the extraordinary power of plants.  In my research I have noted there is a clear link between plants historically used medicinally and those cultivated and gathered for dyes. Many plants that can be used for dyes can also be used as herbs, flavourings and natural treatments. Inspired by the beauty of these plants, I decided to use them as the imagery for my print and stitch based work for my MA project.  Some of the sources I am consulting are the online archives of various university collections of botanical herbaria - collections of preserved plant specimens, and the several excellent books of Roger Phillips and Martin Rix.

I've used these photographic sources as the basis for both embroidered and drawn imagery that will be later translated into prints and stitched embellishment for my final collection of garments I plan on creating for my MA exhibition. I like to stitch freehand, using a variety of mostly knitting yarns in different fibres, textures and weights, stitching first white on white, and afterward dyeing them.  Cellulose (cotton, linen, hemp, bamboo) and protein (wool, silk, milk) fibres take the colour from the dyes differently, creating a lovely monochrome palette.

As well as drawings of from plants, I have been making drawings based on my embroideries for development into screenprint imagery. I feel the drawing take on a looser quality this way.  

BELOW: scattered seeds embroidery of french knots, chain and cross stitches on 100% hemp, then dyed with madder, accompanied by the drawing based on the stitching.   

ABOVE: Queen Anne's Lace seedhead embroidery with wool on linen, and floating seeds embroidery with silk and linen on wool dyed in goldenrod, with accompanying drawings.  

BELOW: Leaves and asters embroidery with various yarns on cotton gauze, dyed in marigold with iron.

BELOW: drawings of weld, goldenrod and foxglove with india ink on vellum, ready to be exposed to screen, and underneath, the resulting print with iron paste on linen.  Next step, sample printing in colour!

New Experiments

My life has undergone quite a sea change since I last wrote.  First, I left reasonably stable employment as a studio technician and teacher to go back to school.  Second, and slightly more dramatically, after a mad summer of dyeing, knitting, canning, pickling, gardening, farming and craft-fairing, I left my friends, family and ninety-nine percent of my possessions behind and moved to London, England, to begin a master's degree in textiles at Chelsea College of Art and Design.  This venture had been contemplated for some long time, and pondered with my typical amount of vacillation, hesitation and constant what-ifs. Now here, I sometimes question how this could be my life - living in London - but I consider myself very fortunate to be given the opportunity to devote this kind of focused time to my studio practice. 

I have always been seduced and bewitched by colour, how it is made and its significance to human culture and history. The origin of colour and how it is used is endlessly fascinating to me.  So while the focus of my MA project is actualy natural dye printing and unlocking the secrets to its processes, at the heart of my research is colour. After many years of experimenting with using natural dyes for immersion dyeing, I had only been trying to find the time to try printing with them.  As a printer I love working with dyes because of their luminosity and transparency - they work on the cloth like watercolour - but recently I have become increasingly concerned about the adverse health and environmental effects of working with synthetic chemical dyes over many years.  Further, the more I work with natural dyes, the more I find myself favouring their colour palette. 

Over the next six months I will be sharing my MA research here and I hope this documentation of my process will serve to show that natural dyes can be used in ways very similar to those used with fibre-reactive or acid dyes for textile printing.  One of the lofty aims of my project is to foster the use of natural dyes as an alternative to conventional dyes in craft production.

I shall explore varied ways of applying the colour to the cloth, via different print pastes, pre-treatments, mordants and assistants, as well as attempting to discover all the possible permutations of colour by adding colour-shifting acids, alkalis and mordants to the dyes.  In the meantime, I am doing lots of reading into the rich history of our relationship with plants, particularly those used for dye, and sharing some of the cultural history of those dyestuffs here.  I am also researching how natural dyes were used in industrial production prior to the discovery of synthetic colour in the mid 19th century, and how the move to synthetic dyes changed the world - this is not a melodramatic statement - this shift was at the very crux of the Industrial Revolution. 

colour swatches in progress

To begin, I am testing the variety of colours that can be obtained from the various commercial extracts easily available from several suppliers.  I have begun by working with those from Pure Tinctoria and the partnership between Maiwa & Couleurs des Plantes.  Extracts are powdered dyestuffs that are soluble in water - the colour has already been extracted from the plant source.  To make a print paste, I add thickener to my solution of water and extract.  I will discuss the exact process in future dispatches.  I intend to use my print pastes for screen printing, but at the moment, I am only sampling small swatches of colour, so I am applying the colour by stencil instead.  I have chosen to work on linen, hemp and wool fabrics, as these are the historical fibres of Europe, and the dyes should react differently to cellulose and protein fibres.

applying the extracts to both mordanted and unmordanted wool

Above are some colour samples before steaming - these colours will be very much brighter and lighter once steamed and washed.  Shown below are the very beginnings of my colour tests, recently steam-set and washed, to see if the colour would hold, and it did.  In a momentary lapse of planning, I did not photograph these samples before steaming, only after steaming, before and after washing.  Before steaming, the colours are more subdued and less vibrant than you see them here.  The chemical reaction that releases the colourants and bonds them to the fibre does not occur until steaming, as heat is required for the reaction to happen.  Happily upon washing, while the print paste, which has a slightly yellowish cast, washes away, leaving behind beautiful, brilliant colour.

after steaming, prior to washing

Now that I am deep into my research, I see everything through a the lens of colour, plants and history - I am truly a nerd about it!  I promise to also share selected adventures of lovely things in London, like my frequent pilgrimages to the V&A, weekly walks along the Regent's Canal and other discoveries while I'm abroad.   I hope to hear from kindred spirits as I go along, so please do comment and/or contact me.

 after steaming and washing: vibrant hues from annatto, madder and coreopsis
 

Obsession: Rhubarb

My Obsession for the Month of May is Rhubarb.  It is such a beautiful vegetable.  Perhaps one cannot really call it a fruit, but it is the first true fruit of spring.  I currently have about five plants going, which seems like quite a few, since rhubarb plants are large, but if you are canning or preserving the rhubarb, it is easy to dispatch with what five plants can produce. Putting down, or putting up the rhubarb is the task I address today.

The simplest, and very fast method for preserving rhubarb is to wash, chop, measure, and then freeze the stalks.  Simply throw them in bags in the freezer.  I always measure it first, and then label the bag with the amount inside. This simplifies things later when you go to use it.

First, both with my beautiful forced rhubarb, and my regular rhubarb crop, I made rhubarb compote, using the recipe from Alice Water's Chez Panisse Fruit:

1 lb of rhubarb
zest of 1 orange (valencia or other juice orange)
1/2 cup white sugar
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

Combine ingredients together in an ungreased baking dish.  Bake covered for 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Remove cover and bake for another 5-10 minutes, or until rhubarb is soft, but still in pieces.  


This compote is lovely on ice cream, creme fraiche or yogurt, or eaten on its own.  It would also be nice with meat.  I find it best if you leave it for several days before eating so that the flavours can really meld.  

The orange zest beautifully tempers the tartness of the rhubarb.  The first batch of compote that I made with the forced rhubarb was eaten fairly immediately - 1 and 3/4 jars full. There they are, in the refrigerator beside last year's dill pickles. It is a beautiful bright pink colour. 

For the second batch, I multiplied the recipe six times to make enough to preserve in jars.  I harvested six pounds of rhubarb! I applied the same method as above, but after placing the compote in jars, I processed the compote for 15 minutes in a boiling water bath.  This ensured that my jars would properly seal.  Six pounds of rhubarb yielded 4 quart jars.

Notice that the compote made with this rhubarb is different in colour, made up of of the red and green parts of the rhubarb stalk.  To achieve a pink colour, you can exclude the green parts of the stalk, using only the red, but I do not like to waste any part of a good stalk of rhubarb.  I like the odd green colour of the the compote.

 Second, I made rhubarb jam, which is something I have never tried.  I always make strawberry-rhubarb jam, but this year I was inspired by my newest culinary obsession,  The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, a birthday gift from my dear mother.  The book's author, and proprietor of the Blue Chair Jam Company, Rachel Saunders, praises the purity of flavour of plain rhubarb jam:

"One thing that always mystifies me is the difficulty of finding rhubarb cooked on its own; we always seem to succumb to the temptation to combine it with something else.  Yet rhubarb's unique flavour and texture set it apart from other early summer ingredients, and a really perfect rhubarb jam is hard to beat."

The recipe contains only rhubarb, sugar and lemon juice. Lemon juice brings out the flavour of the fruit.  It is an ingredient in all of Rachel Saunders Blue Chair jams.  The jam was everything promised in this beautiful cookbook - intense fruit flavour, tart and wonderful.  I ate it for breakfast this morning.

Recently, while reacquainting myself with The Victorian Kitchen Garden,  I learned not only of the technique of growing rhubarb in a forcing pot, as I did this year, but also of raising it in a heated, darkened forcing shed to bring on the growth of rhubarb in the winter.  In the north of England, they once had whole buildings devoted to this purpose.  Rhubarb forcing factories!  Now that I've seen that, I wondered if it is possible do so in one's basement. My suspicion was confirmed by Dick Raymond of Garden Ways Joy of Gardening.  This is possible. More on this later!

Perhaps we are tired of hearing all about rhubarb, but this will not be the last you hear of it from me.  I have yet to extoll its virtues as a useful natural dye plant and mordant!