3 Pictures for 2025

[bookscorpion]

Looking back, 2025 was a good year for me. I cut back work to three days a week and that freed up so much time and energy, I am never going back to working more if I can help it. I did a bunch of projects and had great vacations, and I took about 1000 photos every month, but I had no problems picking three for this.

I went to visit my partner Bawdy in Montana in April and we had a lovely week together: hanging out, going to the zoo and the dog park and going on a roadtrip. Which is where we raced the train so I could get out of the car in time to take photos.

I learned how to solar dye fibre and went on a foraging and dyeing spree all summer. The red and blue on the right are dyed with madder and black beans that I bought, everything else is dyed with plants I foraged in the park and cemetery. I'm spinning it and weaving a landscape tapestry.



I started to feed the crows at the park and I have been doing that for a year now. They learned to recognise me immediately after one feeding and now will follow me in the trees to where I feed them. In summer, they brought their fledglings along and I got to see them grow up from gangly teenagers to more or less adult crows. This is the one crow I can recognise from his permanently drooping wing and his bold personality.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Such lovely dye colours!

[bookscorpion]

I was surprised when I put them all together like this to see how many different shades I had managed with just a handful of plants and two mordants (alum and iron). It's a deeply satisfying project.

[smallhobbit]

Lovely dye colours - your landscape tapestry should be beautiful!

[bookscorpion]

Thank you - I'm about halfway through, I'm excited to be able to take it off the loom, wash it and take pictures in natural light

[yourlibrarian]

What a great bunch of memories (and achievements!) for the year. You will definitely have crow stalkers now 😄

Very cool about the dyeing. Is that something you've been wanting to try for a while or did you just stumble onto it this past year?

[bookscorpion]

I've been meaning to try dyeing and I was looking up dyeing with onion skins (which I still haven't done by now but I'm collecting them) when I found out about it. I love things I can just set down and forget about for a while until I'm ready to continue, and solar dyeing is that.

You can bet I'm not going to the park without treats any more. They stick to territories even in winter, just as a swarm and not individual pairs, so there's the group of crows I'm feeding in one particular territory and the others who ignore me because they don't know.

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, that definitely makes the craft more convenient!

[adafrog]

:)

[brightly_lit]

Omg, I would love to hear literally everything about your solar-dyed fiber. For starters, I didn't know fiber could be solar-dyed! (I've only ever used pots and the microwave.) I'm also interested in how color-fast you expect it to be. Have you tried washing any of it? How did it do? Gorgeous stuff!

[bookscorpion]

This is the article I read about it. Basically, you just put water, mordant, dystuff and fibre into a mason jar and put it in a sunny spot, ans then you wait. We had nice warm weather over the summer, so a week or two on the window sill was plenty for all the dyes I tried. Green walnuts, madder, black beans, St John's Wort, lady's mantle and stinging nettles all worked nicely. I tried birch but it didn't take, I think it was too late in the year for it. Rose petals also didn't do anything, maybe for the same reason.

I found a list of plants you can use that has information on what mordant to use for what colour and the fastness of each. I washed most of them after spinning them for the tapestry and that went without any bleeding or fading.

I had a blast doing this! You can never really tell what colour you will get, it depends on the time you harvest the plant, the amount of sunshine, the fibre ect. I want to try again this year, and I am kind of considering doing a wheel of the year dying project, I just need to figure out which plant to harvest when. Stinging nettles are on the spring list for sure - the one I tried I harvested in August and they made a lovely grey-green, but I think they will make a brighter green when harvested young.

The article says to take notes and I can only emphasize that. I used a lot of different combinations of dye stuffs and fibre types, and with two or three fibres I am not 100% sure any more what fibre they are. Which isn't super important for this project but still, I definitely plan to keep meticulous notes in future (I have a card catalogue for fibre and fibre projects).

I posted a lot of photos on my Pillowfort. Please ask if you have any more questions!

[brightly_lit]

Solar dyeing would work quite well where I live, I think. It gets very hot and sunny in the summer here, and I'm always trying to find new ways to put the sun to use instead of constantly having to battle it.

That madder-dyed one is GORGEOUS.

I've saved all these links for future use. Your Pillowfort is also a wonderful record to see what combinations create what colors; I'll be referring to it a lot if/when I try this myself -- I'm so glad you shared that. I was wondering if mold is a concern, and then I saw you mention it on your Pillowfort -- so if there's enough water, the fiber sinks below the surface and prevents mold?

I love to see all your experiments, and I would love to hear how the dye lasts over time.

Thank you so much for this wealth of information!