Have to post today!

Today's date is great - 7/1/17 (7117)
It is hot today, I have left my tapestry out in the heat. Someone suggested that I might singe it with flame but I think the sun is plenty hot enough and can carry the element of fire for me.
I have taken it out of the earth for the time being, am just letting it bake in the sun. I might try putting some leaves or other big thing that might work as a stencil/resist and see if that has any effect. I doubt it but I will try it anyway.
I am about to go out and hang the washing, the first things will probably be dry by the time I hang it all out. Ah, Summer!

Even the flowers are getting burnt.

The hollyhocks are throwing heaps of flowers down onto the ground and I am valiantly collecting them. Now I just have to think about what I want to do with them, and when.
At least I have discovered that the dried up flowers do produce colour, so I don't have to race out first thing every morning to get them before the sun gets to them.

But first I have to get over the heat and find some energy.

Continuing on.

I noticed the date: 12/12/16, so had to blog.
Nothing of much interest has occurred. I have left my little tapestry piece in the garden, under the hollyhocks. Some flowers fell on it and it was damp in the morning, due to the dew. More flowers have fallen but they have dried out as it was hot today.

But there is a little colour from the petals. They are also tending to disintegrate in the heat, and with handling, so that may be an issue.

It is supposed to be hot again tomorrow but there is rain forecast for a couple of days hence, so I will try to be patient and not interfere with the process in the meantime. It is quite possible that the tapestry will get wet as the household gardener might water the plants. Not a natural element I suppose, but still water. Just not rain.

I Can't Resist

As I may have already said, the hollyhocks are gorgeous - and prolific. They keep flowering ...

and throwing beautiful spent flowers on the ground where I walk. I just can't let them go to waste!

Consequently, the freezer is getting more and more full of flowers. It's lucky we live near two supermarkets, there isn't all that much room in the freezer for food.

I keep picking the flowers up and photographing the beautiful patterns on them. I have also MANY photos of the flowers.

Can you see the cute little face in the white part? Or is it a monstrous face??

Now I have discovered the pretty little seed pods.

I even found some seeds lying on the ground today. 

I will have to start designing!

The shapes make me think of a workshop I did a few years ago with Jane Sassaman. I will have to go back to my notes and see what I can do with the ideas floating around in my head.

I also have quite a bit of fabric, dyed using the hollyhocks. They aren't all the correct colour for representing the flowers but that doesn't matter, one of the good things about Jane's class was the stylising of the images. I can use whatever colours I want, it doesn't actually have to look like hollyhocks, they are just my starting point.

If I ever get around to doing more than looking and thinking.

You can find a downloadable PDF, and video, at Quilting Arts, about this design process.

It's That Time of Year Again.

Happy New Year to my thousands of readers!
Today sees the first of the hot summer weather begin in Melbourne - unfortunately.
The hydrangea is in full bloom,

the hollyhock is throwing down flowers left, right and centre -

what a waste!! I am not collecting them as there is nowhere to put them or work with them at the moment. (Renovations continue. Things are still in boxes.)

We also have a white one that has come up, no use for dyeing at all.

And a pink one, I might try it one day but not yet, I need to use the fabric I dyed last year first, which was from a darker flower.
I'll just have to hope the flowers continue to bloom as long as they did last year - and that I come up with an idea for using the fabric.

Christmas inertia

I am trying to overcome the inertia that you get once Christmas is over.  Boxing Day was ok, I had a few things to do - and avoided all shopping centres.
But I had put today aside to finally do something with the frozen flowers.

So far I have soaked some silk in alum solution. I did that a couple of days ago and today I actually got some flowers out of the freezer and soaked them in lukewarm water, as recommended by India Flint.
I am using two books: Eco-Colour by India Flint and Colours from Nature by Jenny Dean.
India recommends putting the frozen flowers in a bag that can be squeezed to get the colour out, so I have used cotton gauze.  It usually takes some of the colour and I have kept those bits for machine embroideries. This time, though, the gauze has not been soaked in alum and neither have the flowers. So I used the water I had soaked the silk in, in case there is any alum left in it.

The hollyhocks have given some purple colour, almost immediately. I diligently squeezed the mass of flowers, they end up feeling really squishy and slightly disgusting. The colour was very pale, so I am leaving the fabric in with the frozen flowers and hoping that more colour will leach out. I will leave it for a few days.
I tried this previously and the plant matter started to rot and gave me some stains, so I will have to keep an eye on it, not leave it as long as I did previously. But I have also thought that it might not rot if it is under the liquid, so I have weighed it all down with a jar.  Here's hoping.
The gardener in the family has been doing daily harvesting of dandelion flowers for me. I read that you can use them for dyeing - and it stops them from seeding and causing more plants to grow in our garden, where we don't really want them.

I had initially thought that I might get yellow dye but when I read the book last night, it was under the Green section.  And when I looked at the frozen pile I realised that it is predominantly green.

So far it is looking a very murky brown-green-yellow colour, and rather pale.  I may have to overdye that fabric.  At least the alum is supposed to be ok environmentally and I can put the plant matter in the compost heap.

Christmas Eve

The weather was perfect today - not hot, not cold, not windy, not anything negative. I was finally inspired to go out to our new glasshouse and dig out some of the dyeing equipment. I soaked some of my silk in an alum solution.  It has boiled for an hour and is being left for a time. As it is Christmas day tomorrow, I may not get around to doing the dyeing part, I will see. The recommendation is to leave it overnight, at least. Last year I inadvertently left some of the fabric for over a week but later found out that that is a recommended practice. I don't think I will last that long this year though.
The hollyhocks are in wonderful bloom. I have been keeping some out of the freezer, letting them get all dry and crumbly. I hope they work as well as last year.
Then I decided to take some more pictures of the flowers, trying some of the settings on my camera. It takes quite good images on the automatic setting but I decided to play around with the settings today, to see if I can remember how to do certain things, and to see if I could get some special effects. Some of the photos turned out ok.

Playing around with the settings, not that successfully.

After dinner we decided that we should take the dog out - it had got too hot for her in the afternoon and we had been busy in the morning. Off we went to Yarra Bend Park. We didn't get there till almost 9.00 and the sun was about to set.
Lo and behold (very appropriate for Christmas) a huge stream of fruit bats/flying foxes were just leaving to go foraging in the night. There were thousands of them!!
I took some more photos. It was quite dark by then and I couldn't see the camera that well, so the playing around with settings wasn't fully successful. But it was a wonderful sight and a lovely night for a walk.

What happened to winter?

There was an article in the newspaper today about the warmer weather we have been having.  I was just commenting to some people last night that I don't think we have had much of a winter - we have some cold nights and mornings but the days are usually in the mid-teens.  I am sure I remember doing yard duty in below 10degrees.  Of course, that was in Lalor, where the flat land allows the wind to whistle through.  Some days doing PE was a real penance, especially as the teacher doesn't get to run around!

One of the things that has amazed me is the hollyhocks.  I posted about dyeing fabric, using the flowers, on Christmas day - and I was wondering if there would still be flowers left. Well ... a couple of weeks ago I took a photo of the hollyhocks flowering in another part of the garden.  They are still flowering!!!  The ones I used for the dyeing haven't had flowers for ages but the ones near the glasshouse (but outside, in the weather) have flowers and have had all year so far.  It is strange, the flowers bloom and seem to stay on the stem, drying out very slowly. I didn't bother taking another photo today, the same flowers are on the stem.

The jonquils and daffodils are out, the decorative blossom trees in the streets are starting to bloom.  I saw crows taking sticks to a nest in the city about a month ago.

Yesterday I went for a walk and took some photos of one of the gum trees and the various stages of its blossom, from buds to dry gumnuts.   It really seems like spring already.

I know there are a lot of winter flowers, it just feels like spring.

Oh, there was a rosella there too.

Autumn weather

We've all been complaining about the unusually hot weather lately. Today we were 'not complaining' about being rather cool.  The temperature where we were only got to 17C (62F) - and it was windy!  This is a bit of a change from the 35C (95F) we had a few days ago.  Typical Melbourne weather.  It is supposed to warm up again in a few days but not to the same heat we have been enduring.

We took Penny to the beach at St Kilda, for a short run.  We had totally forgotten that the Grand Prix was on.  It was a little tricky to get to the beach we wanted but we did manage it.  Turns out the race was just starting as we left the beach - it is a very noisy race! It rained in the morning (celebrations!!!) but was fine for the race.

I recently saw a post on Vera's blog about her Naked Lady flowers.  I thought I had missed my chance to post about them because the heat did dreadful things to them.  But, lo and behold, there were some in the garden today.
I had to post about them, just to see if I get lots of hits because of what we call them.  I have no idea of their proper name, I have always known them as Naked Ladies.

The hollyhocks have seeded and new plants are coming up - and they are flowering too!  I keep getting more flowers in the freezer.  I will have to do some more dyeing soon.  I just need to think about what I am going to do with the fabric.  But I can't let those wonderful flowers just go to waste - not that they would be wasted, we do have a good compost heap.

We were also lucky to see a Dingy Swallowtail Butterfly emerge from its chrysalis yesterday.  It took a while for its wings to dry out and we were able to get a few good shots.

If you look closely, you can see the drop of liquid hanging.  This is the last of the liquid it squirts out just before it is ready to fly away.
It doesn't look all that dingy to me.  Not sure why it has that name.

I remember having the caterpillars in my classroom for several years.  We got the eggs from the Melbourne Zoo Butterfly House, they stayed on the lemon tree I had in a pot in the classroom, and then they made their chrysalises.  As they take quite a while to emerge and let their wings dry, we got to see part of the process once the school day started.  One year we had waited patiently through the weeks of the process and took the tree outside so the butterfly could fly away at the right time. We all sat quietly, watching it emerge, flutter its wings dry and get ready to fly.  Just as it eventually fluttered away, down swooped a magpie for a lovely butterfly snack!  A life lesson learnt that day.  There was just a shocked silence, then we went back inside.

Natural dyeing with hollyhocks that were not frozen

As I was getting ready to do more dyeing using the frozen flowers, I accidentally crumbled some of the dried flower that I had just picked up from the ground onto one of my pieces of silk.  The silk was damp as it had been soaking in an alum solution and the colour just rushed out from the crumbled bits. It was amazing to see.
Of course I couldn't resist that - I had to see if it would stay in the fabric.  So I laid out some of the silk and crumbled the dried flowers and some of the fresh petals that had fallen off (I'm still not picking them off the plant, there is no need, there are so many flowers) along the length of the silk and rolled it up.

Then I got all confused, as I have already said (I'm blaming the hot weather), and put the fabric in a jar with the leftover alum solution.  I think I had intended to just let it lie and dry out in a plastic bag, as I did with onion skins and vinegar recently.

However, I didn't.  So it has been in the jar, in the glasshouse, for three days.  The water changed colour over that time, giving me hope that something good would be happening.

Today I took it out and rinsed it.  I was very excited to see the different colours.  The dried petals have given quite a darker colour and there are parts that have taken on the redder fresh petals.  The dye has stayed, not much came out in the rinse at all.

I was interested to see that some of the petals had become quite transparent, the colour had leached out.

I did this at the same time as the frozen flowers that went mouldy. There was no mould with this lot, perhaps because it was in an airtight jar or perhaps it had something to do with the alum solution. I am not a scientist so don't know. I am just happy that there was no staining that I didn't want!

Playing with Photoshop

I had heard that Adobe is allowing people to download their CS2 suite of programs free!! It is old software but does everything that I can think of needing.
Here is a link about it. However, there is a link on this page to an article that says Adobe is NOT offering it free.  So see if it works for you, if you are interested.
Here is a link to Adobe.
Lucky me, I got Photoshop when I was a student and it was cheaper. Photoshop is an amazing program that has all sorts of applications that I could never use, or even think of discovering (if you know what I mean).

Here is a simple example of some of the amazing things you can end up with, with very little effort.

Original photo

Cropped from top of original

Playing with Hue and Saturation

Hue and Saturation, then Posterise

Then I went back to the original cropped image and played with the gradient map tool. The colours are dictated by the program, not chosen by me.

.

I can't remember if I posterised this one or not, it certainly looks like it.

One thing I find very interesting about these images is how the dark and light centre seems to be receding or protruding, depending on the tone and colour.
I could spend hours playing around with the effects. I just need to think how I might use the images and with what technique.

The hollyhocks keep on flowering

I have continued to pick up discarded flowers from the hollyhock and now have quite a collection.  I am going to have to use them soon, they are taking up too much room in our freezer.  So far, I have only collected and frozen them.  I need to get inspired to dye again.

The flowers change colour as they dry up, I am wondering if that will affect the dyeing, if I can try for some contact prints, or variegated dying. I'll have to do some research, and re-reading, before I get going again.

It is the season of insects and flowers, so I am having some fun practising with my new camera.

Neither of these have been manipulated with photo programs, it was just the flower and the time of day. The bee was so busy fertilising the hollyhocks that I could get up quite close and it wasn't bothered.