Vermin!

 What is the point of growing beautiful carrots, when the wretched rats get in and eat most of them over night!!!!!!!!!! Yes, there is bait out, and yes, they're under 2 layers of mesh and still they get in.

So far they have probably eaten about 70 full grown carrots and I'm completely fed up with the carnage. It has to be rats or mice, as the whole raised bed is under mesh around the small cages in the photos. What to do??

Copper over Iron.

 The large bundle that had pieces of Spotted Gum bark in it was very bulky, so it only had a little bit of a boil up in the iron mordant pot, but then I took it out and left if for a week or so and then added it to the copper mordant pot a few days later. The marks are as a result of both iron and copper and I love it!

 The pieces of bark were reddish in colour, dry and quite thick, so I broke them up into pieces about  1cm in size. It was still very hard to wrap and tie them.

              This is the bit of the fabric that must have had the most exposure to the iron.

            When washed and ironed all the colours will be paler, but they are subtly beautiful!

Bundles.

 Shown above are the 3 new bundles just out of the boiling pot. The lower one has the purple hibiscus in it, the middle has narrow Eucalypt leaves and the furthest has yellow Gazania flowers. There is quite a difference in colour at this stage, but as I gather that green colour in particular is not very stable, I wonder what the end result will be.

Here are the bundles a couple of days later, with brown marks developing on 2 of them and the green one showing tantalising shadows of blue. It is so hard to wait before opening them!

New Stamp.

    Carrying on with the theme of native plant seed pods I've carved another in the series today.

 It is a slightly more complex job to carve this one with the tiny pointed seed capsules on each head.
Unfortunately I tried a new form of carving material which I don't like at all, it's very brittle and crumbly even though it carves well. I'm not very happy with the lower seed head either, but the top one has turned out well.

                   Another test run on fabric. I wonder which seed pod to choose next.

Continuing Eco-Dyeing.

 Having used iron as a mordant the last time that I tried eco-dyeing, I wanted to see what the addition of copper would do the  colours that I got this time.  I couldn't find any old bits of copper pipe lying around so I went to the local 'Trash & Treasure' market and found these 2 little copper pots. It seems a shame to wreck them in a boiling dye bath, but they were very inexpensive and I ended up using only the small one.

 First to be wrapped up were these narrow leaf Peppermint Gum leaves which had blown down during a very windy week. Some were dryish and some quite fresh.

 The colour of these dried native Hibiscus flowers is quite intense but I know I won't get that colour from the boiling.  It was interesting to note that the ends of the fresh stalks immediately stained the cotton green, but again I don't expect that it will last.

 I ran out of the purple Hibiscus flowers so added a few sprigs of mauve Spur-Flower, a kind of Plectranthus I think.

Here is the little copper pot in the middle of the dye pot before I added the liquid.

You can just see the green marks on the white bundle in the middle made by the Hibiscus stalks.

The big dark bundle at the back is one containing bits of bark that I started to dye in the iron mordant last time but decided that I didn't have room for it. I hope that it doesn't have too much iron in it to allow the copper to work.

Gumnut Stamp.

 I wanted to try out my idea of stamping onto the eco-dyed fabric, so today I carved a trio of gumnuts. The middle one is a little strange but then so are the ones in nature!

Here is the carved stamp and a print made onto one of the less interesting pieces of dyed fabric.
      It  might be an interesting piece of textile art if I stitched around the image perhaps.

Plenty of Leaves Here!

 I am fortunately enough to have a vast number of Eucalypt trees available from which to get more leaves for eco-dyeing. This huge specimen was severely stressed during the years of drought and has thrown out lots of seeds to germinate in case the parent tree died.

 The tree survived, and so did the lovely ring of saplings that have grown up around it. The juvenile leaves are a really blue-green in colour so I wonder if they will produce a different colour to the mature leaves.

 These are sapling that we planted a few years ago and they are growing nicely. As there are several different species, that will give me yet more leaves to try out, both green and dry.

 This tree fell down in a storm and the roots were sufficiently preserved to allow the tree to send up a batch of vertical branches from the horizontal trunk, yet another species from which to collect leaves.

These specimens are too tall to be able to reach the canopy, so I will collect the dry leaves from the grass underneath.

The Unwrap.

 I couldn't wait any longer before unwrapping the very dark iron mordanted fabric bundles that have been sitting drying for a week on my table. Again, I'm a little disappointed in the overall effect, but some parts of some pieces are definitely worth working with.

                                              This is probably the best of them all I think.

 Two examples above and below using Wormwood leaves. They did smell very strong while boiling, but it was worth it as they have made some very nice marks.