It started with a visit from my friend Sarah, her book recommendation ("Making Ink; A Forager's Guide to Natural Inkmaking" by Jason Logan), and a walk up the butte behind our new house. (We've moved back to Montana since my last entry). The hills around us are covered in a yellow flowering shrub called Rabbitbrush that Sarah said was sometimes used to dye wool and cotton. So we picked some of the flowers, and I started experimenting. First with inks (which are basically natural dyes that you concentrate by evaporating off the water). I made ink from the rabbitbrush, from cotoneaster berries, crab apple bark and the mapleseed pods in our back yard. I kept a notebook:
and painted and used dip pens:
You can get amazing colors from plants. Avocado seeds and skins make the most incredible blood red. The problem with getting dye colors from plants is that many of them are not stable. They are often pH sensitive (the cotoneaster berry ink is a lovely purple in the bottle, but turns grey as soon as it hits the paper) and they can also be fugitive (which means they fade in the light). The yellow rabbitbrush ink test strip I have in my sunny studio window has faded to about half of its original color. Avocado is also a fugitive color, unfortunately. But so far, the mapleseed pod ink is staying strong.
But here's the cool thing - you can turn your plant dyes into something called lake pigments - which are solid pigments that you can grind and turn into watercolor paint, or oil paint, or egg tempera. And sometimes the lake pigment of a particular color is more stable than the dye is. More on that in the next post!