“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.
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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.

Yes, you can make paint out of rocks. I’ll admit it takes a bit of effort, but there is something so exciting about picking up a rock, and discovering if it will make a good color-or not. The first magical thing about this is that a rock can look like one color when it’s solid, and another color when it’s pulverized into a powder to make pigment. Pigment is what gives paint its color. If you use oil for example, the oil is the same color no matter what color of paint you make; the oil is the binding material, and the pigment is what gives it the color. So getting back to the magic part-a pink rock gave me orange paint, a grey rock gave me green paint, and yes, a yellow ochre colored rock gave me yellow ochre color. But then one super bright orange rock gave me literally no color. I can’t explain it, I need to talk to a geologist. 

June 1 I began a 10-week artist residency on NCC’s East 40. I had every intention of blogging almost eery day, but here I am with so much going on it was hard to figure out where to start. So I’ll start with the East 40 itself. I’m not a selfie person, but the first day of the residency the weather was so glorious, and I wanted something to post about the residency so I broke down and did one. 
The East 40 is literally 40 acres on the East end of the Northampton Community College campus. It’s still off the grid-solar panels and propane tanks for power, rain catchment for water and um, a composting toilet. It’s part community garden, part nature preserve, part outdoor classroom, part pottery studio and part anything you can dream up-including an artist residency. Last year was the pilot year for the residency, thanks to professor Rachael Gorchov. I contacted her earlier in the year, she put me in touch with Kelly Allen who is in charge of the East 40 and he plugged me in to many resources at the college. This residency is still in its infancy, but I’m honored to be one of the pioneers, so to speak. The “product” of this residency won’t just be my artwork, but instructional materials that can be used by any NCC faculty and a community education class in natural dye and art materials. 
On day one, Kelly root-tilled a plot near the ceramics shed that is my home base so to speak for the residency so I could grow dye plants, woad in particular. I spent all day in the sun (with 100+ sun block on) pulling weeds out of the bed he just tilled. I only had time to plant half the bed with woad seeds. It’s been fun to watch the woad sprout and grow along with the residency. Yesterday I spent hours again pulling weeds, as I will seed most of the rest of the bed today.
So why am I planting woad for an artist residency, you may be wondering. Woad is one of the oldest and most color-fast blue dye. And it wasn’t just a dye-it was also used as a pigment, and I intend to use it both to dye fiber and to attempt to make a pigment. Pigments the solid, inert, and color-fast material that gives paint its color. So if I make a pigment, I can add oil for oil paint-or egg for egg tempera, gum arabic and other ingredients for pastel, gouache, watercolor etc. Of course, I’m going to use the art supplies once I make enough of them. I’ve done a whole lot more than plant woad so far, but this is enough for one post.

After making the lake pigments, it dawned on me I already had clay that was dug from the Northampton Community College (NCC) “East 40” part of the campus. Last year when I made loom weights for my warp-weighted loom, I carefully scooped the finest clay from the top of the barrel knowing it could be used as pigment. It was still wet in the jar. 

I discovered that the same spreading out on the glass thing worked perfectly to dry what I’m calling “NCC Gold Ochre” for it’s origin and color. I find it just extraordinary that clay dug from the earth-right on a campus where I work-can be converted into pigment with sifting/straining, water, gravity, all simple manipulations. After the super water-logged lake pigments that took considerable amounts of spreading out to dry, I found the NCC gold ochre yielded a lot of finished powder pigment by comparison.

In January whenI did my Madder (plant root) and Cochineal (bug that lives on prickly pear cactus) dye pots, I decided to take the plunge into lake pigments. I remember decades ago when I first got serious about painting, reading about lake pigments but I only began natural dyeing in 2018. And then it wasn’t until reading “The Art & Science of Natural Dyes” did I discover I could make a lake pigment out of the “exhaust” dye after dyeing fiber!  The alchemy of taking natural dye and converting it to a solid pigment was easier than I dared hope. I had both chemicals on the shelf already-and they are both on the shelves in your local grocery store. 

It starts with an acid, alum-used in making pickles, which is followed by the addition of the alkali washing soda, which you can find in the laundry aisle. It makes this lovely fizz, like the volcano you made in 6th grade science. Then the dye becomes a solid and settles to the bottom. Simple. Well, then you have to get rid of all the extra water. The idea is head-slapping simple. 

The laborious part is getting rid of the water. At first I just took a sauce pan (that does not get used for cooking anymore) and bailed out the now-clear water at the top, once the pigment settled to the bottom. Even that is slightly tricky to do without stirring up the sediment-the pigment-at the bottom. Then comes the giant coffee filter lining a metal mesh strainer, and taking the sludge left in the coffee filter after the water drips through, and putting it in jars. Even after that filtration, the pigment sludge just had too much water to make even water-based paints like watercolor. I spread out the sludge on a large plate of glass and let it dry. Et voila! What I scraped off the glass is a dried powder that can be used for any media-oil, egg tempera, watercolor, pastel, crayon etc.! 

I was hooked. Now I’m on a pigment quest, exploring what I can do the very, very old school way with making pigments and varied types of paint from those pigments.

While I’m not “done” with the sort of weavings and paintings I showed in my thesis exhibition, I’m already researching and sketching for a new project-liturgical banners. I don’t recall when these little flag like things with “Happy Spring” or Santa Claus or whatever started sprouting up on suburban lawns-it was probably while I was living in NYC. Since moving to Easton, they seem only to be multiplying-along with the tribe affiliation lawn signs, flags and banners. I had the idea of using the same hardware as most folks use for their seasonal banners or flags, but making, and displaying in the appropriate season, liturgical banners. 
My husband’s Christmas gift of the book “English Medieval Embroidery; Opus Anglicanum” is a gold mine for my research. As some of you might know, I’m a huge fan of deep reds, and reds often play key roles in my painting, dyeing and weaving, have ever since I started making paintings. To my surprise and delight, this book has a huge amount of embroidery on deep red velvet-it is on the cover, it dominates the background for embroideries throughout the book. I was so inspired I ordered silk velvet-suitably to dye-along with embroidery threads, also ready to dye. 
Yesterday at church, the priest held up the church copy of the book of gospels, which had repoussé metal on the corners and a medallion on the center of the cover, over a background of-you guessed it-of deep red velvet. Then he pointed to the metal cross that was on a background of brocade fabric and asked if I could replace the current fabric with red velvet! Mind you, I had already ordered silk velvet, and had intended to try both Madder root and cochineal to dye it red. So marvelously enough, it looks like I’m actually going to be doing a real liturgical textile project before I even start on my liturgical banners for the house project!

Yes, I’m binge watching the Twilight Zone for New Year’s. There is one episode in particular that has afflicted and haunted me since I first watched it. It really hits a nerve; “Time enough at last.” A simple man who just wants the freedom to read, but is oppressed by his life including his job at the bank, sneaks into the bank vault at lunch to read. His desire in life is simple-to read. The bomb gets dropped while he is in the vault, and he emerges the only man left alive. O.k., so he would have been burned up by the fallout, but lets suspend that reality because we are after all in the Twilight Zone. He finds a grocery store-all the food he could ever eat and more. But he is alone and desolate, until he spots the Public Library. He is overjoyed. He selects and stacks up piles and piles and piles of books. Finally, there is enough time. All the time I need, all the time I want. He bends down to pick up a book, and his glasses fall off, you can hear the lenses breaking. He manages to pick up the glasses, the camera gives us a sample of the extremely blurred vision he has without them, and the lenses simply fall out. 

Now that I’m retired from my full-time job, there is enough time at last. This episode had a particular resonance when I watched it this year, on January 1, the first day of my retirement. I don’t take a minute for granted.