Terry Sargent Peart: October 2010

Saturday, October 23, 2010

EUCALYPTUS AND SOY

One of the main things I wanted to accomplish on our trip to Southern California was to gather some eucalyptus leaves. I had other things on my list, too. But, foremost, I wanted eucalyptus. In the fantastic book about dyeing fabric using plants and flowers, Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles she talks about eucalyptus quite a bit. It seems some of the most wonderful colors will come from the warmer climes The author, India Flint, lives in Australia, the land of the weird and the wonderful.

I prepared some fabric using soy milk. It actually started to ferment. She says in her book, you can keep this soy soaked fabric for up to a year and it just keeps getting better and better for dyeing. Hmmmm.

Once I gathered some of the long leaves (and a few of the buds, which I kept separate) and some round leaves from another tree that look and smell like eucalyptus, except they are round shaped, I took them back to the hotel and rinsed them off and spread the damp leaves onto the soy-fabric.

I rolled the fabric up tightly and stuffed them into ziploc baggies. That was a week ago on Thursday, October 14. I've been trying to keep them warm ever since.

A week later you can smell the fermentation going on, even with the bags closed. I've got them in a bag by the heater register. Here's how they look now. You can see some reddish color starting to develop.

A weird and wonderful experiment!

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

ON THE ROAD - WEDNESDAY

Good news from the Southern Hemisphere today. We watched the first Chilean miner come up last night just before we went to bed. Every TV we encountered today was tuned to live coverage of the ongoing rescue operations. We watched them bring up the last miner while we were having our dinner tonight. Welcome home. Bravo Chile!