I've been lamenting the fact that while the entire rest of the southern hemisphere seems to have had a 'heatwave', summer in our little corner of Taranaki seems to have been hit & miss.
While others have moaned about 'climate change' making everything too hot, we have had shitty, windy days with ocean temps 15.7 degree celsius (ie very freakin could !) for weeks on end.

Although this has been blah for me it has been ideal for our native bush. All the plants are looking healthy & vibrant.
There have been masses of sweetly scented flowers on all our trees; some day pollinated, others night pollinated, & this means our insects are happy.
Harakeke flowers & pods, karamu berries & kawakawa fruit production this year is abundant which means the birds are also having an amazing summer.

Since December we have had the pleasure of watching twin ruru develop from fledgling to teenagers to adults, flocks of pipiwharauroa visiting the kowhai trees, seen & heard many korimako, the tui haven't needed to be quite so territorial, the small birds such as riroriro & tauhou are plentiful, as are the finches.
Every being seems calm & happy.
It's been delightful.
I imagine all the creatures we don't see are having a great season too.

I have also taken advantage of the abundance & harvested for some ink & pigment making experiments.

In December I started with harakeke pods as they seemed even more abundant, attractive & diverse than last year.  
​There also seemed to be such an amazing variety of different coloured pods this year.
​I harvested some immature as well as mature pods as I wanted to see if I could obtain different coloured inks which reflected the different colours & characteristics of the pods. 
So far it seems to have been successful & I'll just keep testing the inks every now & then to check colour & light fastness.
I should probably tell you, altho it is obvious from the photos, that my initial ink making was specifically for using with a dip pen.
I also had a partially exhausted tanekaha leaf dye bath so I reduced that down to see what I might get.

The 2nd batch of pods were from a different part of our place & one specifically from the driveway as it was hanging over the road & bashing into the car as we drove past. 
This time I decided to use 30cm squares of various weight cotton fabric as the 1st filter cloths & squeezed the liquid through the pieces of cloth by hand.
​I'm interested to see if the difference in cloth colours remains with time & washing - or whether it will just gradually drift back to harkeke tannin brown.

I'm pretty excited about these inks as most of them seem to have a great consistency for using with my pointy pen.
Our birds are moulting at the moment so I'm collecting feathers to make quills . . . . I'll keep you posted on that one ;)

Next up was the fruit of my most loved NZ native plant, Kawakawa.
So plentiful that the birds were barely touching them which I took as a sign that it would be ok for me to gather a few to play with.
​Honestly, I have never, ever, seen so many fruit & my god, they smell divine !
Like a papaya with a hint of black pepper. 

The colour is the pulp, the little dot is the seed. The fruit crush super, duper easily & can be squashed through a sieve with minimal fuss & bother & the ink is fugitive ! 
​Everything I wrote a month ago has vanished from the page.

So in the end I dried some out on filter paper & resorted to science & modern technology.

I had read about a 'Golden' product GAC900 which is designed to be mixed with acrylic paints to create a textile paint which can be heat set. I'm not averse to all man-made chemicals & science* so I bought some & mixed it with a few of my pigments to see what I might be able to achieve.

Must admit I was surprised & really quiet in awe of how easy it is to use & how great it felt to be able to use my humble little scrapings, mouldy sludges & strange smelling fruit pulps into well pigmented textile paints.
 
I let them dry & left them sitting for 10 days or so & now they are ironed & sitting on the back of the couch in the studio, hanging out seeing what happens with time . . .  I'll keep you posted on this too ;)

I know I would be able to do this with both harakeke & tanekaha without the GAC900 as they are substantive dyes & dye cellulose fibre well. 
I also know I could probably use gum arabic &/or agar to thicken the ink to paint like consistency.
I plan to do some experimenting with that either during February or sometime in March, however I really, really, really want to be able to mono print kawakawa leaves & now I know it is possible.

Below is me having a bit of fun with harakeke 'ink' using the dried sediment from filtering one of the inks through fabric &using the 3 modifiers I have made; ash water, copper water & iron water (clear, blue & orange drops on the last photo)

January weather was amazing & we spent time most of our days just hanging out & going to the beach to swim which was superb & is really all I ever want to do in summer anyway.

By the time February arrived I was well rested & ready to do some explorations into using NZ native plants for dyeing fabric & fibre.

The harakeke seed pods were at their best for harvesting for making a dye bath too & I was lucky enough to have my friend, Isla, walk me thru the process, which is very easy but it is a process which takes a few days.
Here's a link to a post on Isla's website which outlines the process we used; natural-dyeing-with-harakeke-seed-pods

In the dye bath I made from the pods I had harvested I dyed a few lengths of muka, 3xDMC cotton embroidery threads of various thickness, a 60cm square of calico, a 30cm square of cotton drill & various sized rectangles of cotton drill fabric I had cut out with a view to sewing a purl soho boxy tee.

It seems the harakeke pods are high in tannins so no surprise with the colours the cottons & cotton fabrics came out but it was lovely to see the variation in the colours of the muka fibres.

Rather than dyeing a single large piece of fabric which would have been awkward to fit in my dye pot, I pre-cut the pieces of fabric for my sewing.

What I hadn't considered was the extra shrinkage of the fabric courtesy of simmering for an hour in hot water.
I had already washed & dried the fabric BUT I do cold washes & line dry ! What a bastard trap for rookies !

I sewed up my top anyway & fortunately the pattern makes a generous size garment so the only problem area is the armhole depth which is a little too tight to be comfortable.
But I have a plan !
I think I'll open that seam, on each side, & insert a gusset just to give me a bit more space.

And now, finally, we get to the point of why I wanted to sew this particular top.
It's all about the bottom panel. Which is a separate piece.
A beautifully proportioned rectangle of fabric which lends itself to embellishment.
I was watching Sashiko Stitching taught by Lisa Solomon on Creativebug & in one part of the class she is wearing a top she has made with a sashiko embroidered bottom.

I had the fabric : I had the threads : I had the pattern I wanted to embroider & now I have a top which is the memory piece of my very 1st foray into dyeing with harakeke seed pods.

Well let's just say I'm not giving up hope of ever being successful at 'eco bundle dyeing' on silk, however, I won't be rushing out & buying more silk !   

I made a dye bath out some raurekau bark I had in the freezer. I found in the past the this bark will often yield a lot of colour so I made it fairly weak.
I wrapped up the silk again, with a few different leaves & seeds inside & used the same method as I did with my 1st attempt. 

I got beautiful yellow kowhai seeds prints & a couple of lovely subtle leaf prints, so I cut this section off.
Alas, again virtually no colour on the fabric.

Spurred on by the success of the ferns I wrapped some into the remainder of the cloth, wrapped it up again, tied it with string & popped it in the dye bath again. 

This time I got beautiful fern prints & lovely relief pattern from the string but again didn't get colour right to the centre.

So that's it, my experiment with silk & bundle dyeing is over.
Next adventure with plant dyes will be an immersion bath.