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.

BLUE MONDAY

Happy August! So we harvested our first batch of polygonum tinctorium sometimes referred to as japanese indigo on Monday. We processed it today and ended up with some exciting results. The silk seemed to turn the most blue from the recipe we used. The cotton turned more of a green blue. We are working on an embroidery project for a show in 2012 in Gainesville, FL. All of the fabrics and embroidery floss will make its way into our new sewn pieces. The wonderful thing about indigo is that it is less fugitive than other plant pigments. We anticipate making a second batch where we ferment the leaves (for a month) like traditional japanese processing. This is supposed to give a brilliant and light fast blue. So todays experiments are only the tip of the iceburg in seeing what our plants can do. The polygonum has been a pleasure to grow.  As you can see on our last blog post the flowers are so pretty and you can make a beautiful dye out of it.  Also we will get a second round of the japanese indigo as we have a second crop and the plants we trimmed are growing back already. It is truly a weed.  I am posting pics of an early sugar pumpkin and a honeydew that we crossed with a cantaloup (we call it "the honeydoo doo"). delicious! XO A&J

HOT SUMMER DAYS!!!

This extreme heat is dictating our farming schedule. We wake up early to water and harvest and spray in the evenings.  We feel like trapped indoors like winter. We have some plants and crop really starting to thrive and other things that are dying off.  We love gardening because you see birth, death, growth, disease, insect habitats. It is like a mini ecosystem, and you can never predict what it is going to do. Here are some pics of our garden.  You can see the garden, cabbage, kraut, cherries, baby komquats, pumkins, dyers indigo flowers, drying flax in the garage. We are so excited to harvest the flax!  And  a pic of Matokie in his chair! XOXO A&J

Something New!

New sign!

One of many new bottles of ink with our brand new logo designed by Jeremy!

Tonight we are launching our new company "Belly of Flea Inks and Paints"! We have been really busy this summer making ink and watercolor pans at home in preparation for our shop opening up! We have had so much fun doing this and we hope you will go and check it out! 

Our site: Information about the stuff we make and the materials we use.www.bellyofflea.tumblr.com

Etsy: Our lil' shoppe!

www.bellyofflea.etsy.com

Belly of Flea flickr: Pictures of our farm and pigment/ink/paint making in progress. (and the occasional cat picture...)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bellyofflea/

Here is the opening message from our etsy shop! 


Hello and welcome to Belly of Flea Inks & Paints, a historical artist ink and watercolor supplier, est. 2002. We are committed to producing sustainable and non-toxic professional grade artist water media. We use organically home grown pigments. We also use organic plant, insect, and genuine earthen and mineral pigments to help fill in the gaps of what we cannot grow in the Belly of Flea mini-farm. We are dedicated to making safe art supplies that have little impact on the earth. 

Marie Antoinette's favorite shade of reddish brown fabric was christened "Puce" the French word for flea. The name stuck and dyers soon offered hues called, "Belly of Flea", "Thigh of Flea", and "Blushing Flea". When we first started making inks, some of our very first colors were various browns including, oak gall, walnut, and pokeberry. The name seemed fitting. Belly of Flea is run by the husband and wife team, Jeremy Seth Taylor and Allyson Mellberg Taylor. We are working artists, gardeners, and teachers based in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Red Ochre, Lemon Yellow Ochre, Maya Indigo Blue, & Green Earth Handmade Watercolor Halfpans!

Jeremy's Awesome Logo & Package Design in action!

Lots of halfpans!

Shiny brand new watercolor cake drying!

June Garden Update

I love this time of the year. Our garden starts to get really big, the flowers are starting to bloom, little green tomatoes are showing up, its exciting! We have some new things in our garden this year: flax, holy basil, tomatillos, etc. Here are some pics! Hope everyone is having an awesome summer. xo!

Flax plants only flower for part of a day before they fall apart and begin the process of growing the seedpods which we will harvest in a few weeks! They are so delicate and pretty.

This is the first year we have tried to grow tomatillos. The plants are really beautiful. And from what we can see now, very productive. I am going to be freezing some salsa verde!

Tulsi! Also known as Holy Basil, which will be harvested and dried for delicious herbal tea.

Echinacea!

Farm view late June. Sunflowers are about half grown now & the zinnias are blooming!

There is an old tree stump & root system in our yard that predates us living here, it is an amazing substrate for mushrooms (no we are not eating them!) but they are really beautiful and we have lots of different varieties after every rain. These popped up today.

Edible flowers! Aphrodisiac! Ooooh la la. Also good on salad.

Blue Green

Its funny. When you realize you can make a pigment out of something that you don't have in your yard, and that is also not a weed (i.e. you can't just stop along the side of the road and pick it like pokeweed anywhere you like) it kind of makes you go crazy! When we read about Iris dye we started eyeing up everyone's iris plants in their yard... (for the record we have them, but ours are white and don't have any dye to give) "look at those!", "whoa, those are the darkest ones we have seen", "can we drive by at night and pick them?" "do you think they have cameras?!!" In the end I mustered up the guts and went in to the Charlottesville Veterinary Clinic, who had the biggest, darkest purple Irises and just told them what we wanted to do with them and sheepishly asked if I could pick some... people are so nice and so no sneaky flower stealing was necessary... whew. I am posting pics of what we got from that batch... we haven't made anything from the beautiful blue-green ink just yet, so there will have to be a follow up post soon to show what it looks like. In the meantime! Look at these beautiful flowers before we destroyed them!

Big Iris!

 So we boiled the flowers until they lost their coloration (they turn sort of greyish pink) and then added alum to fix the color. At that point the ink turned from purple to dark blue-green. Then we added glycerin and vinegar to stabilize the liquid. More pics of it in action soon. Irises are done and we are grateful that someone let us pick some! 

Here is our garden as of mid-May... its already much bigger now! One of my favorite new things we have growing is German Chamomile. Well its sort of new anyhow, last year Jeremy planted it and it never showed up. The seeds are tiny and herbs can sometimes be really hard to germinate... we were stoked and surprised to find four plants that had decided to come up this year instead! Volunteers! So we transplanted them together into their own little section and they are going wild!  Everyday we get more and more flowers and the fresh chamomile tea is so delicate and wonderful. 

Hope everyone is well and enjoying the beginnings of summer. We will post more updates soon!

xo,

Allyson

SUMMER IS HERE

It is May 26 and it was 95 degrees today. It has been a mild spring so far, but today was a glimpse of summer. We are hoping this summer is not a scorcher like the last. This week we got everything in the garden including our tomatoes, dyers knotweed sprouts, melons, and pumpkins. We seem to have an ant and aphid problem. They are buddies. Every year it is something else, but we are trying to keep our cool and do the best we can. One thing we have learned is that "you have to let go at some point". You cannot control a drought, you cannot control a groundhog burrowing under your fence, and you certainly cannot control extreme blight, or tornados breaking your cold frames. With gardening you have to let go.  We are learning slowly but surely that "patience is a virtue".  We have had some awesome harvests so far. Checkout the giant leek, the juneberries, raddishes, and the dyers weld drying in the garage.

"who plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see believes in god" ~ anonymous