Eco printing, alpacas and time travel

What? It's December? When did that happen? :-)
I have run through 2 months of combining silk work and portraits and December simply brings a bit of panic into it!

I dug into the eco printing and have had some gorgeous results!

Various kinds of eucalyptus

It takes practice but in the end...the thrill (yes it is) is in not knowing what you'll create!

But knowing that I'm printing Nature's colors exclusively is another appeal to this art form.

I spent 10 days in October at the NC State Fair as the silk artist in the Village of Yesteryear

rose leaves from Seven Sisters

Heirloom roses and pineapple sage

and although it was tiring with daily 12 hour days, I met SO many people who were happy to add a scarf to their handmade collections!
November seems to have dissipated and I don't know where it went to. I do know that I am on a borrowed computer as mine bit the dust (although Best Buy is determined to make it work since it is under warranty) and I had no idea how many of my photos were on the other computer. Luckily I have Carbonite backup but having to make temporary folders to store work is time consuming.

I'll pop some portraits up in my next post...seems odd to mix them with the silk. :-)

Oh and I must add one more image....Bella! The newest member and a future supplier of fiber for adding some roving into some of my silk!

Meet Bella!

The search for dye plants

We spent a gorgeous day recently collecting sample plants of nature's bounty to do some "eco-dyeing" on silk scarves.
Our current roadsides are awash with wild helianthus and pokeberries. Wild sumac encircles abandoned ponds and we're careful to collect only what we will use.  But my own mini-farm offers up Rose of Sharon, wild buttercups, a lot of mimosa and pokeberry as well as grapes, dogwoods, oak, pear and maple...a lot of trees on my land that are soon to turn glorious colors.   In the meantime we go with greens, yellows...lol, even red clay and tobacco!

The bounty

Water from a spring and wild picking

 I soaked the scarves in a mordant, then layered our finds on top, covered them up, rolled and wrapped them and two days later, walla! Eco dyed scarves.

It's a lot of fun to collect, a lot of time to "do" and in the end, the appeal will be to a certain kind of scarf collector.  

But the search is inspiring, restful and a soothing "back to the earth" kind of methodology that I'll employ a bit more into my fiber art :-)