Archive for category: Diary & News

Last week a friend invited us to a preview of the items she has collected in her garage for a sale next month. She is planning to move house soon, so she has been clearing her house and attic of all the things she has decided she can live without in her next home. As she has been a museum curator and the wife of an antique dealer in past lives, the items for sale make a very interesting collection, especially for those of us who are addicted to weird and wonderful – and sometimes useless – artefacts from the past. So the question is: Do we have room for a full-length sabre in its sheath or two replica Cromwellian helmets or a 12-foot long wooden  paddle for putting loaves of bread into and taking them out of the baker’s oven? Well, perhaps not, but I may just find a home for a wooden hat block in the shape of an old-fashioned bonnet and I do have room for a large old iron cooking pot on legs, which has a layer of rusty iron pieces in the bottom. And my husband will certainly find space on his bookshelves for two volumes of British history, especially as the date inside them is 1794, making them very old books indeed. 

 

 

  So what possible use will I have for this large iron cooking pot?

 

 

 

 Well, first of all I shall remove all the rusty bits of iron from the bottom and put them in a large container and fill it up with a mixture of 2 parts water to 1 part clear vinegar. This will then be allowed to stand for a few weeks and then become my next supply of iron water.

 

 This image shows the pieces of rusty iron ready to be made into iron water.

 

 

 

As for the pot itself, I shall first check that it’s waterproof. If it is, when the weather is warmer it will be the basis for some outdoor dyeing experiments to see the effects of dyeing in an iron pot, using unmordanted wool.

And if it’s not waterproof? Well, that will be a shame but I’m sure the pot will look quite impressive with some plants growing out of it.

This week I took delivery of a beautiful book, “Mushrooms for Dyes, Paper, Pigments & Myco-Stix” by Miriam Rice, with illustrations by Dorothy Beebee. Miriam Rice is the acknowledged authority on the subject of mushroom dyes and I ordered the book in the hope of extending my knowledge and understanding of dye-producing fungi.

The book is a treasure trove of information, with lovely colour photos and wonderful drawings by Dorothy Beebee. It will certainly inspire me to continue to search for fungi to use in the dyepot.

The book is available in the USA from www.mushroomsforcolor.com and in the UK from www.fibrecrafts.com

Snow in our part of the south east of England is fairly uncommon & in many years we may see no snow at all. So it was quite a surprise to look out of the window this morning & see snow falling – not a lot, admittedly, but enough to warrant a photograph.

This photo shows a section of our garden under a light dusting of snow. It’s too cold to do much outside, so I’ll take this opportunity to catch up on some sample labelling & assembling – not a task I enjoy but one that has to be done.

The dyepots have been put away & my thoughts now turn to preparations for the arrival of family & friends who will be spending the festive season with us. So this will probably be my final entry for the year & I thought I would end with some images that are typical of the winter season here.

 
These 2 photos, taken near our home, show the East Anglian landscape in Winter.

This last photo shows our ever-optimistic cat in her characteristic winter role as guardian of the bird table. Note the chicken wire, intended to impede her access to the bird feeding area & which she clears with a single leap, despite her 13 years.

The landscape may be grey & dull at this time of year but our cat’s optimism, as she waits in vain for an unsuspecting bird to fall into her open mouth, seems to sum up the hope we have that the New Year will bring good things for all of us.

I wish everyone all the very best for the festive season & for the New Year & I hope you will continue to follow my blog next year.

Last week I took my husband & a friend to visit The Manor at Hemingford Grey, near St. Ives in Cambridgeshire. This remarkable house, parts of which date back to 1130, is probably the oldest constantly inhabited house in England & was the home of the author Lucy M. Boston until her death in 1990. The Manor is now the home of Lucy Boston’s daughter-in-law, Diana Boston, & can be visited by appointment. It is difficult to describe the magic & atmosphere of the house & its gardens. The house is full of memories of Lucy Boston’s fascinating life & personality & also contains many of the items Lucy wrote about in her Green Knowe series of books for children.

The garden is a wonderful, magical environment. The more formal areas include collections of beautiful & rare roses & bearded irises & some fantastic examples of topiary. But it is the secret garden which particularly attracts me, with its moat & trees providing shade & mystery.

One majestic tree which features in Lucy’s stories sadly had to be felled a little while ago & its trunk now lies on the ground, providing a home for a beautiful collection of bracket fungi & lichen. This reminded me of a student at one of my summer school courses, who brought with her a selection of woollen samples dyed using bracket fungi. The colours ranged from lemon yellow to rusts & browns & this was the first time I had come across the use of bracket fungi as dyes. I have to confess that, to me, the bracket fungi are too beautiful to collect to produce colours which can be so readily obtained from other sources. I prefer to leave them alone. But if you have bracket fungi in your garden & need to remove them from their hosts, or if they are on branches waiting to to be chopped for firewood, it may be worth experimenting with them in the dyepot. Use an alum mordant & try out some of the colour modifers to vary the shades. (See the section on Dahlias for details of using colour modifiers.)