I’m a sucker for historical practices and I’m growing woad, so I just had to make woad balls. If you look at my June 28 post, “The Mother Woad” you’ll see my, how my woad babies have grown, and can learn a bit more about woad, but essentially It’s a plant source of blue dye and pigment. So what’s a woad ball? Well yes, it’s a ball of woad, but it’s more than that. It’s actually a first step in fermentation and processing of the plan. Historically “Woad balls were very valuable and used for trading.” http://www.thewoadcentre.co.uk/the-history-of-woad/ For me, on a pragmatic level, woad balls allow collection at the optimum time for harvest, concentrates the active ingredients of the plant matter and preserves it for future use whenever I want to actually use it. It’s not easy to find anyone selling woad balls or pigment, I don’t know of anyone in this country who sells the processed version, as opposed to the seeds. It was essentially replaced by indigo grown in hotter climates than where I live. Let me digress here to explain the term “indigo.” To quote Wikipedia, “Several species, especially Indigofera tinctoria and Indigofera suffruticosa, are used to produce the dye indigo.” So the word “indigo” can mean the dye or pigment, or it can mean some of the plants that can make it. Woad produces indigo, but not at the high concentrations of, say, Indigofera tinctoria. So why bother with woad? Part of it is climate-I can grow it locally, and part is curiosity since it was used so successfully for so many centuries by my ancestors. In the few dye pots I’ve done so far with woad, it is not identical to indigofera tinctoria etc. that are generally used for what is generally called indigo. Let me give you a food analogy; popping vitamin C pills will give you way more vitamin C than broccoli or an orange; but that doesn’t mean that the broccoli or the orange should not be eaten and you just eat capsules of whatever nutrient. By just taking a synthesized version, you’re losing out on a lot of other stuff. I’m curious to explore this plant (woad) that was the main source of blue for thousands of years. The photos above are screen shots from video I took. I need to edit the videos into something that makes sense, keep checking back to the blog, I'll let you know where to find them. The finished woad balls. You can see the woad plants in the garden plot above the board with the woad balls on it. I didn't harvest all the leaves, there will be more to come, the first planting is growing fast. On the right side of the bed, it's hard to see but there is a second planting that is coming along.
0 Comments
This week Sierra Heath walked into the breezeway where I was working with a bunch of yarrow she had just harvested from her garden plot not that many feet away. It was irresistible, I have never died with yarrow before, so got started right away. Yarrow, like most natural dyestuffs, should be equal in weight to the fiber being dyed. Since it wasn’t a large quantity, I decided I wanted to do swatches of 7 different fabrics plus embroidery floss as a kind of test, along with some nice bias silk ribbon that is pretty light to get the most “bang for my buck” on the 50 grams of yarrow I was given. Yes, I weigh in grams, the math is so much easier than working with ounces. I prepared the pot by putting the yarrow in the pot with water and heated at 180-200 degrees F for about an hour before straining out the plant matter. I put the fibers in and after only a half hour, the wool was a gorgeous, buttery yellow but the rest of the fibers were only weakly colored. I took out the wool so it wouldn’t hog all the dye, it was already perfect and didn’t need anything more. I left everything else in the pot for the full hour that is usual for yarrow. By that time the silk/hemp charmeuse blend was a gorgeous color, but the rest was frankly a bit anemic. One thing I’ve learned from natural dyes, just keep going if you’re not happy with something as-is, there’s always something more that can be done. I thought of copper because the yellow of the too-light fiber was cool, tending towards green anyway. I keep a jar of copper things-cut off bits from pipes, wire and scrap metal from past jewelry projects, soaking in a vinegar/water solution on my kitchen counter. (Doesn’t everyone have one sitting on their kitchen counter?) I brought the jar to the East 40 the next day and dipped the too-light fibers in the copper. Almost immediately, without even warming them up, the copper deepened the colors! You can see for yourself below-the bias cut silk on both the left and right were from the same roll of ribbon and dyed in the same yarrow pot. The only difference is that the pile on the right was dipped in my homemade copper bath! After taking the before-and-after copper bath photo, I took the plunge, or should I say the fiber took the plunge into the copper bath. Not only did I like the color of the copper-dipped fiber better, copper actually increases color-fastness. Next up was to over-dye with indigo (blue), inspired by the cool/greenish hue of the yarrow on the silk and cotton. My hunch was correct-I got some lovely greens.
I tried to make a lake pigment from the leftover dye, but failed. I’m not sure if it was PH issues or if yarrow doesn’t work for making lake pigments-probably my error. My water at home is PH neutral, so I keep forgetting to amend the acidic water at the East 40 before starting a process like making a lake pigment where that is critical. In the past, I could not get a good light blue with indigo. I finally sprung for 3 of the Michel Garcia DVD sets, they have 2 disks in each set, and got some great information about how to get a light blue. Indigo is not soluble in water, it’s a pigment, and historically there have been endless variations from nasty smelly two week or more old urine, to contemporary nasty chemicals that have been used for what we can a “vat” to reduce indigo into a soluble form. I used the Michel Garcia 1-2-3 vat, which uses indigo, fructose and pickling lime. Not nasty. In fact, both the pickling lime and fructose I bought are marketed and sold with the intent of being used in food. The basic idea (ph pun, sorry) is to make the dye bath alkaline and “reduce” (take the oxygen out of) the indigo so it becomes temporarily soluble in water, long enough to get it into the cloth fibers. When you take the cloth out of the vat it should be green! On exposure to the oxygen in the air the indigo once again becomes insoluble, but at that point trapped in the fibers. I made the starter solution for the indigo vat in a quart mason jar. I actually have a nice blue bucket that I have dedicated to using as an indigo vat, but one advantage of making a starter solution in a glass jar is you can see what’s going on better. Below, you can see how on the left the pigment isn’t because it’s too blue, especially at the bottom and top. But on the right, the bottom is a dark green and above it is a kind of brown; only at the top, which is exposed to oxygen, is it blue. This is actually what we want-on the right, the indigo is reduced. From the top view of the jar, you see the bubbles and the metallic sheen; YES. This is what we want to see. I heated water up to 120 degrees and put it in the 5 gallon plastic bucket, then added the starter solution I had made in the quart jar. Back to the light blues; if you don’t get the indigo deep enough into the fibers, you end up with the color only on the outside of the fabric where it can rub or wash off. The solution (oops, another pun, sorry) is a very weak dye bath, so that you can soak the cloth in the bath long enough to get the indigo deep into the fiber. (Duh, why didn’t I think of that. I suppose that’s why I paid to get the DVD’s, Michel Garcia gets the big bucks.) I used only 1 tablespoon of indigo in my dye solution, for two and a half gallons of water in the bucket. For the residency, I was able to get 4 new fabrics that I had not worked with before, and was eager to test how each would absorb the dye, so I cut strips of each of the 4 fabrics. After soaking the fabrics in water, each got 3 dips for about a minute each in the dilute indigo vat. Above, you can see these strips on the drying rack. From left to right, pure wool gauze twill; this was unbleached, and had a yellowish look before dyeing. I was actually quite happy with the greenish tinge on this. Then, hemp silk charmeuse, hemp cotton muslin and finally on the right bamboo rayon.
On the drying rack photo above, I had not yet rinsed the fabrics. I wondered if the kind of mottled appearance was because I hadn’t ironed the fabrics before dyeing, but then when I rinsed and ironed them the blotchiness went away. What I just learned is that because water has so much oxygen, I could have rinsed them before letting them dry. What’s nice about natural dyeing is that there can be such nice results all along the way. A beginner can do something stunning, but there’s always more to learn. Last winter, after I made my first lake pigment (4/29/22) the first paint I made with it was watercolor. I have a small watercolor book, so I just smeared on to see how the paint worked. It suggested a landscape. I added other colors on as I made more pigments, and then paint from them. There was something that really interested me about doing an imaginary landscape. I tend to be terrible at drawing or painting from imagination, so for me this is going out on a limb. But there is something really intriguing to me about how many landscapes I’ve viewed in my lifetime have imprinted on me. The East 40 is a very different landscape-than where I live, and what I’m drawn to. I tend to be drawn to mountains, forest, and or rivers or oceans, but the East 40 has no pond, no stream, and is completely flat, with only a couple shallow tree lines. I’m not sure how this is going to play out in the actual paintings. It may not work out at all, and I might have to change course. Or ? Not to sound like an old TV show, but stay tuned for future episodes-I mean blog posts-to find out.
I like considering everything in a painting, every material that goes into it, and this summer's residency gave me an idea. I did extensive work in clay in my first half of undergraduate, and even though that is now ancient history, I still remember enough to take advantage of the ceramic facilities at the NCC East 40. I have to give credit to Joni One-Benintende, a phenomenal ceramic artist, for inspiring me to paint on clay. She does it in a way you see it as a sculpture, and assume the color is the clay or a real glaze, not “just” painted. What I’m doing, coming at this from the perspective of a painter, is going to be very different, but really, I had to mention Joni because seeing a solo exhibition of her work at East Stroudsburg University’s Gallery about a year ago is what sparked my interest in using clay as a painting ground. I just love the pun-get it-clay as a ground, ha ha! When I used old clothing as a painting support, I didn’t want the fact that it was old clothing to become invisible. I wanted you to see it was old clothing-but only if you looked close enough. Likewise, I don’t want the clay to be some sort of imaginary blank slate. I like to partner with the materials I’m using, not make force them to be something else. I want the clay to look like clay, even after it’s painted, I don’t want the clay-ness to be incidental. On the other hand, at least for now, I’m not making sculpture; I do want a “picture plane” of sorts. I could roll out the clay with a rolling pin and trim it to a precise shape, but I’m not. I’m throwing the clay around so it stretches, cracks, and to a certain extent defines its own edge. On the back of the slab I build in some sort of hanging “hardware” that also serves to put the picture plane in front of, not flush with the wall. Or, the table or whatever it’s on-I haven’t ruled out putting the paintings other places than a wall. From what I’ve found, there are plenty of people using acrylic on clay, but for oil, I have to just wing it, I could not find any advice anywhere. I’m not saying no one has done this, I am certain someone must have/be doing it, just didn’t find them. Knowing what I know about painting technology, I decided that after firing, I would size the clay with rabbit skin glue. Some sort of hide glue, especially rabbit skin glue, is what everybody used historically on any kind of canvass or wooden board before acrylic gesso was invented. I’ve used it on fabric, it’s a great surface to paint on and it’s clear so the clay is still entirely visible. I have some sculptures in my garden that I made around 1979 or 1980, that were only bisque fired. If these only bisque-fired sculptures can last outside year in year out, I’m figuring bisque is good enough for paintings intended to stay inside, but I do have some that are high-fired. I began “doodling” in egg tempera on the back of one of the fired & rabbit skin glue sized slabs; it takes the paint great. In this shot, you can see the “hanging hardware” in the form of clay strips with built in hoes for wire or string. Sorry I don’t have any finished paintings, so far I’ve been generating the materials to make the paintings, but when I have my first finished painting, I’ll be sure to post it here!
Earlier this summer I got to see the Pompeii in Color exhibit. As we all know, Pompeii got buried in volcanic ash, which must have varied in temperature-because there was a painting that showed the effects of heat on only parts of what started out as a monochrome yellow painting! (See photo above.) Tens of thousands of years before Pompeii, humans discovered-and used-the trick of changing the color of earth pigments with fire. I’m a kind of artistic re-enactor, so I wanted to take the fabulous “garden gold” that was dug from the Earth on the NCC East 40 where I’m doing my artist residency this summer, and “burn” it. From the very start of me painting, which is-ahem-a lot of years ago, I have been using burnt sienna and burnt umber, in addition to their unburnt versions, raw sienna and raw umber. Anyone who paints will be familiar with these basic earth colors, and yet, apparently there aren’t lots of weirdos like me who want to burn it themself. I got the idea of putting the dry, powdered garden gold pigment (essentially clay with the impurities taken out by Walter Heath and NCC ceramics students) into a in tin “kiln” just like I did with the vine, see yesterday’s (7-1-22) post. I actually did the “burn” in the same fire as the charcoal and vine pigment, but decided one long post on both would be too long and complicated. Below is my porcelain palette with the garden gold pigment before firing (left) and after (right.) I had a fairly tall tin, and only filled it about 1/10 full. I have zero idea if that made any difference. Well, maybe I can hazard an educated guess. I do know that metal conducts heat, so maybe if the tin were full, the pigment in the center would not have reached as high a temperature? Honestly, I don’t know. I also had no idea how long I was supposed to fire the pigment to get the red color. I just did it an hour like the charcoal. TA DA-IT WORKED! I’m super happy with the color of the burnt pigment, and want to do another burn because I didn’t do enough. That second burn could vary, lighter or darker. Much like my approach to natural dyeing, I get delighted by all the variations I can achieve, I love making colors. I’m not a factory. I suppose you could say it’s a kind of boutique approach to making color, and I have no desire to become a factory. My idea for next time would be to put some rocks in with the pigment. Rocks, I know, also conduct heat, so if I pack the tin so the rocks are as close to the center as possible, all the pigment should get heated up. That’s my theory anyway. Egg tempera is my go-to making paint to do tests. You don't have to make a whole tube, I used the pigment in the photo above, added some egg yolk, mixed with a martini stirrer right in the palette and presto, it was ready to make the paint swatches below. I have to admit, I haven't cracked any of the rocks I burned in the fire on Wednesday. The color of a solid rock is not always the color of the pigment it makes, so I have one more surprise waiting for me when I get a chance to grind those rocks and see what colors they make.
“Vine” and “willow” are the two most popular types of charcoal sticks for artists. Often my students are surprised to learn what a primitive material this is, and that “vine” refers to the stems of grape vine and “willow” branches of that tree. It’s likely that charcoal was the first drawing material, simply taken from wood that had cooled off after a fire. Certainly, charcoal was used tens of thousands of years ago, as cave paintings attest. Chunks of charcoal off a log are not elegant drawing tools. The charcoal sticks Drawing I students get to know up close and personal would not be possible with just grabbing stuff out of a quenched fire. Mother Earth News, The book The Organic Artist and many other sources all recommended the use of a lidded tin with a small hole punched in the top for steam to escape. You don’t want ash, you want the black charcoal and not any of the grey ash, and with these tin “kilns” that’s what I was hoping to get. I used empty cookie, tea and other used tines, even a little mint tin. I chose to make vine charcoal, because I have a grape vine in my back yard. I’ve been told February is ideal grape vine pruning time, so last February I did a major pruning of my vine, and packed the contents into the tins. The idea is to pack them in tight so they don’t warp when fired, but retain a straight stick form. It involves a lot of cutting and you’re also supposed to strip the bark. I didn’t put the lids on at first, to give them a chance to dry out. Then I put the lids on and didn’t open them up until I wanted to show someone how they were packed before I put them in the fire. There was some kind of mold that had formed in-between the sticks. Gross. But it wasn’t like the sticks weren’t bone dry; they weren’t rotted, I was hoping the mold would burn off in the firing. On June 29, I made a fire in the fire pit out at the NCC East 40. I had read conflicting information about the actual fire; one place said you have to have hardwood, and don’t put the tins down until there is no flame; like how my dad would cook food on a charcoal grill the the backyard. I always was surprised that he waited until there was no flame, and said the coals were hotter than the flame. Another sources said build the fire around the tins, and showed a photo with flames engulfing the tin “kilns.” There was cardboard and scraps of wood from who knows what that were already in the fire pit, so I assumed they were good to burn. I looped the cardboard so there would be air in the middle, put the tins on top of the cardboard and packed the wood around the tines so they wouldn’t fall off the cardboard. It worked! The next thing is to wait around an hour after the fire gets hot. I’ll bet the cave people didn’t time this with their phone, but I set the timer on mine and watched the fire closely. The other thing is, if you see fire shooting out the hole-or if steam stops coming out of the hole-you have to quench the fire a.s.a.p. I had a big bucket of dirt and a shovel. Someone had left a charred wok near the fire pit, I decided that would be where I put the tins before dumping dirt on them. Not surprisingly, the smallest tin was the first to flame. I quenched it and keep watch on the rest. I forgot to put a hole in the largest tin, which I found out the hard way-the steam forced the lid open. I put a big rock on the lid. Eventually, fire started shooting out the side of the lid, and so I had to quench that. The smaller pieces were fine, even in the big one that didn’t have a hole. I think the steam just got out the side of the lid, but the lid didn’t blow off because of the rock. When the timer went off on my phone, I took the rest of the tins out of the fire (scooped them up in a metal shovel) and dumped dirt on them. I waited about a half hour before testing if I could take the dirt off the hole in the top of the tins, starting with the little one, using heat-proof gloves and tongs. I moved all the tins to the breezeway, where I put them on fireproof concrete board. Sandra Zajacek and Michael did some clay experiments after I was finished with the fire, so I got out of quenching the fire at the end. The next day, I opened up the tins and discovered that my success rate was really close to 100%. No ash. Just a couple of the largest pieces from the big tin that need some more fire. You can always fire again, but if you get white ash you have lost your material and have to start over. So all in all, I was thrilled. This post is so long, I’ll make the next post about the color change in the pigment I fired. One last photo, me testing them out on a page in my notebook. I found I had some really great sticks, and a variety of hard to soft, thick to thin. They marked and smeared easily, but weren’t too soft, so you could smear and still see the lines if I wanted. Honestly, I’m astounded it worked so well.
It’s been a while since I’ve ground a tube of oil paint! I decided to go for the gold-the garden gold pigment, which was dug from the ground at the NCC East 40. (See the 5/11/22 post for what this pigment looked like when I dried it into a powder.) Eventually I’ll also make tubes of other pigments I’m making, but the garden gold is so hyper local to where I’m working, this was one color I know I waned for sure. I started by just using a palette knife to mix refined linseed oil with the pigment to make a paste. Commerical paints generally have more that just pigment and oil, things like fillers and conditioners to change the properties of individual pigments, so that one color “feels” the same as the next. When you make your own paints, you get to know each pigment in an intimate way, each little property and quirk. If you look close at the photo below, you’ll see there are dry clumps of pigment, despite my mixing with the palette knife. That’s why, even though the garden gold has a nice fine particle size, I need to use the glass muller; to get each particle of pigment dispersed into the oil. It’s a slow process doing it the old school way like this with a muller. I’d want a grinding mill if I were doing any quantity, but I’m not after quantity. I’m after a connection with every material that I’m working with. While mulling, in addition to the swirling lateral motion, you need to rock the muller a teeny bit vertically, one side down the other up then rock the other way. Without the rocking, it creates a kind of suction to where the muller gets stuck to the glass! When done, the finished paint is glassy smooth; above right you can see me scraping the finished paint off the glass. If you take the Community Education paint making workshop this fall, you’ll get to try your own hand at it.
I bought empty tubes; they have an open end at the back. The table I was working on had a nice bounce; this helped me jog the paint from the open end of the tube down towards the cap. (I've got video of this, but it isn't edited down to size yet.) The final step is to crimp the open end closed with a pliers. And then, the label. I couldn’t resist painting out some of the color from the tube, and putting on a label. I can blame my dear friend Maria Kittler for getting me hooked on natural dyeing. She signed us up for a workshop at Edge of the Woods nursery, and then planted a dye garden for me in her back yard! With only a 4’ x 4’ raised bed, we knew we had to be strategic, and only plant the absolute best dye plants. Research showed that Woad (blue) madder (red) and Weld (yellow) were the absolute triple crown of permanent dye plants. They were used from antiquity and extensively in the middle ages etc. For example the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters in NYC featured fiber dyed from all three (woad, madder & weld); roughly 600 years later, the woad in particular has held its color amazingly well. There are countless examples I could have given going back to ancient Egypt, but many of us are familiar with the Unicorn Tapestries so I decided to use them as an example. Woad is a biennial-supposedly. Also supposedly, its best harvested to dye with in the first year and flowers in the second year. Yes, supposedly. I got much better woad dye results for some reason (there could be many reasons) from plants that were in full bloom. In the photo above left, you can see I stripped off the leaves for the dye pot. As for it being a biennial, I would swear there are woad plants in Marla’s garden that just didn’t die in winter and have lasted 4 years. On literally the first day of the residency, I pulled many a weed, and planted some seeds Marla had saved from a previous year. I asked Marla to let her plants go to seed so I could harvest the seeds to plant out at the East 40. It’s amazing how well the woad complied with my request! The madder has kind of choked out the woad, so that only maybe 25% of the 4’ x 4’ plot is woad at this point. Woad loves growing back after getting cut right down to the ground. It will do that over and over the same year, it’s almost a year-round green vigorous grower in this climate. So I cut down all the woad in her bed, (photo above left shows it lying on the grass after I harvested it) and then plucked all the leaves for dye material and all the seeds for planting, photo above right.
Even though I’m generally a failure at growing anything from seed, even that little bit of woad I sowed the first day has provided some plants. I call them my woad babies, and have been tucking them in to bed each night. Seriously though, I have been getting rid of all the weeds around them and watering them as needed. Today I generously seeded around the woad babies, and on the other side of the bed where I didn’t have plants yet. The hope is, that when I do the dye workshop in September, that the class will get to help me pick the woad, and that we can do a nice big dye pot with it. The active ingredient, so to speak in woad is indigotin, the same as in indigo. Admittedly woad has less indigotin than indigo, but as it was what my ancestors used and grows well in this climate, it has somehow captured my imagination. Also, I got some delicate bright blues from it that so far I have not been able to get with indigo, which does not like this climate. So there. Go woad! The first pastels I made-from the “Garden Gold” clay dug from the NCC East 40 (photo of this in 5/11/22 post “Back to Earth Pigment”), turned out great. I was not at all prepared for the spectacular failure of the next pastels I attempted to make. If you look at my April 2022 blog post “Don’t Jump in this lake” you will see how I made my first lake pigments. I attempted to make pastels using those lake pigments. They looked great after I made them. Then I came back the next day, to find the pastels had self-destructed; one looked like it had exploded, there were shards and powder all around what had been a well-formed pastel stick just the day before. As with other paints, the pigment is what gives the color. For pastels (also watercolor and gouache paints) the binding material is gum arabic, which is resin from the acacia tree. I had used only drops of the gum arabic in the garden gold pastels. I learned the hard way that the amount of gum arabic binder needed to make a usable pastel varies wildly. I suspected the exploding pastel didn’t have enough binder (the gum arabic) and possibly also not enough glycerine. I took the exploded bits and pieces, ground them up, then mixed in a more significant amount of gum arabic and glycerine. One thing I had read is that the glycerine should be proportioned to half of the amount of gum arabic. Glycerine is a natural product that improves the consistency of the pastels, and also has an antimicrobial property. It’s often sold as a moisturizer for skin and is totally non-toxic. I’ve also read that honey can be substituted for the glycerine. The next day, the re-ground pastels had not self-exploded. But when I picked them up and tried to scribble with them a bit, the pastels broke into bits. I had to conclude I was on the right track-the pastels didn’t self-explode. But when used, they crumbled. So once again, I re-ground them adding even more gum arabic and glycerin. The next day, they were not dry enough to use. Interesting-I had read that pastels took several days to dry, but in my previous attempts, they had dried overnight. I took the fact that they took longer to dry as a clue I was on the right track with adding additional binder (gum arabic). I’m happy to report that three was a charm; the pastels held together well enough to use. Sort of.
There is such a thing as too much binder-in this case, gum arabic. Too much binder, and the pastels were too hard, the marks made with them thin, not a mice amount of color but a kind of thin lime. I took paintbrush, dipped it in water and scrubbed at the scratchy, too-hard (too much binder) pastel marks, and the pigment dispersed easily into a nice “wash” of color. The nice thing is, with all my bungling about, I’m not wasting anything. Even my “failures” result in something I can still use. So far I have not been able to make a satisfactory pastel from a rock pigment. More binder or more glycerin or honey perhaps? I looked at the price tag of the gum arabic I have been using; it said Pearl Paint, and the price was three dollars something. Ooops. Not only has Pearl paint been closed for about a decade, but gum arabic goes for at least 3 times what was on that price tag. I’ve been using probably 20 year old gum arabic. Maybe that’s an issue-off to the art supply store for me. Once I try some fresh gum arabic I’ll post my results. |
Cindy VojnovicArtist & Educator Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|