COLORS OF SUMMER

Hello everyone it is officially fall, and the rainy weather has kept us indoors more than we would like. But it is keeping us busy with dying fabric for a show in Gainsville in 2012. We turned over the summer garden last month to the fall garden. All of the fall plants were planted early enough, but we had a really bad hail storm which shredded up the plants and the cabbage worms are really bad this year. So we have been doing  some extensive harvesting of all of our Japanese Indigo (Polygonum Tinctorium) and Marigold for dying. We also planted some cover crop which is always a joy for fall and winter.  We are hoping first frost comes late this year so some plants can play catch up.

One of our big dying projects involved processing our Safflower that we harvested last summer. We had to buy some extra petals to supplement our small harvest. But it was truly a joy to see the fluorescent natural colors extracted from something that grew in your garden.

The Japanese Indigo we harvested was also very beautiful. You can see the electric range of blues we got. We had so much Indigo that we did not process all of it, but you can see the beautiful blue colors of the leaves as they dried.

We also have had the pleasure of seeing this volunteer gourd come to life. It came up on its own through the grass where we dumped our seeds last summer (when we made our anniversary gourd bird houses).

We found some a Polygonum variety of Japanese Indigo growing in the wild downtown through the cracks in the brick. We really believe that sustainable and non-toxic dying/artmaking are not exclusive to country dwellers.