Natural dye – mulberry leaf

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Today I decided to re-dye some of the off white fleece I dyed with Aloe Vera. This time I thought I would try a mulberry leaf dye. I only added 100g of the fleece because I have become fond of that off white shade, I will be spinning it up soon.

To begin this dye session, I picked 200g of mulberry leaf and ripped them up into small pieces. I then added them to my paint bag in the dye pot. I bought this mixture to a simmer and kept it there while I did a few small jobs around the house (about half an hour). Then I turned the dye pot heat off and let it cool for a bit while I soaked 100g of the cream fleece. The fleece went a bit darker when it got wet, but not enough to fool me into keeping the whole lot.

I found one reference to stabilising chlorophyll in mulberry leaf dye. This reference advised adding a copper solution and a tiny pinch of caustic soda (lye). I added a half cup of copper solution and a pinch of caustic soda to my dye pot.

Then I plonked the fleece into the dye pot, leaving the leaves in their paint bag in there too. I gradually heated the lot up to a simmer and held it there for an hour, while I was spinning.

The fleece was then spun out in the washing machine and put out in the sun to dry.

The resulting colour is unexpected to say the least. I got yellow with a slight touch of green. I wonder if that is a result of dying over the Aloe dye or maybe adding too much or not enough copper. I also wonder if the colour will change with exposure to light like the Dead Man’s Foot mushroom did. That one began as a glorious yellow and after drying in the sun it became a gorgeous russet brown. Time will tell I guess.

I also remembered to update my dye journal.

This is the eventual colour of the Dead Man’s Foot mushroom dyed wool. Exposure to light can change a colour so much.

Natural dye – food colouring

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I’m not sure if this counts as a natural dye, but I am playing around with food colours today. I have seen so many videos that use food colours and get such vibrant results, I want to try that for myself.

Like any other dye pot, I need to assess the need for mordant first. Most videos recommend using vinegar as a mordant. The only problem with that is vinegar isn’t a mordant or fixitive, it is a modifier. Maybe the food dye need to be set in an acid bath? I will use vinegar in the bath to begin with, just because everyone seems to use it. However, I will also add some alum to mordant the wool. Here goes:

Heat the water and add 15g of alum to it. Then add 100g of fleece from Eli the sheep and one strip of a wool top I was given recently (just to see if it would be a different colour). I let that soak for half an hour or so while I weed the garden.

The banana circle is in there somewhere. I plan on finding it again.
There it is!

Now to make the dye bath. I add half a cup of vinegar and a tablespoon of food colour to the dye bath (after taking the top out of course) and mix it through. Then I stir that through and add the top back in. I leave it to soak on a gentle heat again while I wash up.

The Eli fleece
The strip of unknown top

After about an hour the water has become much clearer and the fibre much more pink.

I let the pot cool for a while then rinsed the lot in the sink with similar heat water (lukewarm). A spin in the washing machine spinner in a pillow case and the fibre is ready to sit in the sun for a few hours and dry.

The resulting colour is so brightly pink that it is hard to focus on. It is fun to get bright colours for a change and is really easy to do. I don’t think the dye will be very light fast, but time will tell.

Plants in the garden- Custard Apple

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Our custard apple tree comes from a tree in a school I used to work at (and still do occasionally). This tree was growing there as a sapling when I started work in 2007, making the parent tree 17 years old. One of my friends, who works there now, collected a few seeds and started some trees from it. I have coddled this little tree along for a couple of years now and she is growing really well.

We buried several chickens and a rabbit under her in various repottings, so she now carries the spirit of those animals (in our philosophy). Now she is planted out into the garden with a guinea fowl under her, such a crowded tree.

The Custard Apple is a perennial tree that likes to grow in subtropical climates. They don’t like frost, but will survive it, they don’t like drought, but will survive it and they don’t like root disturbance, but will tolerate it. They do like regular water with no waterlogging, regular feeding with manures and mulch and regular weeding around the base.

Custard Apples taste wonderful, creamy and sweet with a satisfying freshness to them. In addition to their taste, the seeds and leaves are useful in a multitude of ways. The leaves can be made into a strong tea and used to treat internal worms. The leaf can also be used as a dye on wool and fabric with a copper mordant, although the resulting colour is a greenish yellow. The fruit can be used to treat diarrhea, fever and sore throat. The seeds can be ground, soaked in oil and used to kill head lice. We have used it as a sedative for our sheep in stressful situations. The fruit and leaves are said to have a sedating effect on people and they certainly have the same effect on sheep.

Our Custard Apple tree is planted out in a part of the yard the chooks have access to, so she also provides shade and shelter to the chooks. When she grows larger, she will provide shade and shelter to us as well, such a useful tree.

She looks a little ragged at the moment because Winter is coming in. At this time of year, she loses some of her old leaves and sort of dozes through the months until Spring.

New family members – Blind Freddy and helper

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Kraken, our 12 year old sheep who we lost a month ago.

Since we lost our old sheep; Kraken, we have been feeling very sheep poor. The grass and weeds are growing very fast and it seems that we won’t be able to find the house in the grass sometimes. My sister had some little weaner sheep that she needed to find a home for, it seemed to be a win: win for both of us. Little Freddy and Baa Baa (his seeing eye sheep) are now welcomed into our menagerie.

Freddy is the white boy and Baa Baa is the pied boy.

Freddy was an orphan and lay in the paddock close to death for a good while after his birth. He was a determined little lad though and he decided to live. My sister found him and bought him back from the edge of death, but his early exposure to the elements mean that he has very little sight.

Freddy and Baa Baa finding their way around the paddock

It will take him a few days to find his way around the paddock. He had bonded with another young wether in the herd who acted as a guide for him, so my sister bought them both down to enjoy the extra grass and a safe, hopefully happy home for their lifetime. This is not the fate of most wethers (desexed males) they are usually the first to be slaughtered for meat so we are glad to be able to save a couple of them. Hopefully they will be able to join the herd is a few days time and find their happy place here with us.

Natural Dyes – aloe vera

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My next adventure began with the need to prune a few leaves from the Aloe Vera plant in a pot in my front yard. I cut the leaves off and looked at the pile thinking it was a shame to waste them. I went looking for an option for using them and came across this video. Aloe Vera has been used as a dye for fabric and wool for a long time, it gives a lovely salmon/pink colour on cotton, so I am curious what colour I will get with wool.

I weighed my cut up Aloe Vera leaf and discovered I had 350g of fresh material. I dug out 200g of scoured fleece from my stores. That way I have a 1.5:1 WOF (Weight Of Fibre) ratio.

I simmered the Aloe with water and 1/2 cup of ammonia for half an hour and got a decent colour in the pot.

While that was simmering away, I mordanted the fleece with alum at a rate of 15g per 100g of fleece. Then I poured the dye pot into the mordanting pot. In theory the mordant would have been taken up by the fleece and would then take in the dye. I simmered the pot for about 10 minutes then turned the heat off and left the pot to cool.

I also updated my dye journal.

The resulting colour is underwhelming. I certainly didn’t get any pink or peach shades. I ended up with a nice shade of off white.

I will dye over this fleece and try to get a stronger colour from another dye material.

New life for my natural dye journal

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Way back in 2016 in began a dye journal. I made the book for this myself and I used it enthusiastically for about two months… then new interests took over (as they do). I continued to experiment with natural dyes and blog about it, but the diary fell by the wayside.

Some of my posts are linked here:

Onion skins and iron

Powdered gardenia and alum

Logwood on cotton fabric

Usnea and iron

Johnson grass and pomegranate skins

Loquot leaf and copper

Red amaranth and copper

Elderberry and alum

Dead man’s Foot mushroom

Recently, my daughter has been gathering old documents and such from her friend who works at the dump in a nearby town. He diverts old stuff before it gets to the landfill and brings it to her. Thanks Corey and Meeks. She recently came to me with a book, it was an unassuming notebook with no distinguishing features. At first I thought she may have found more love letters to unrequited lovers (not a rare occurrence, but always interesting) but she let me open the book myself to discover…

Someone else’s abandoned natural dye journal. I was immediately taken by the history in the piece and also curious to try some of the recipes. Instead I haphazardly transferred my dye journal into this one and decided to continue on in my hit and miss style. I will add to this journal at will (when I remember) and maybe one day someone will save it from the landfill bin once again and someone new will get excited by my experiments.

Local insects and animals – Sweet potato hornworm

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Today’s discovery is of caterpillars in the sweet potatoes. These particular caterpillars are huge and very hungry. We took a few photos and left them be. A bit of searching on the internet revealed them as Sweet potato hornworm. They are huge and hungry, but the swamp rats have nibbled the tubers away from the bottom of the sweet potatoes, so we won’t be getting any harvest from them anyway. These caterpillars come in black and green (and sometimes yellow apparently). They eat sweet potato, taro and eggplant leaves and they pupate in the soil for a short time before hatching into hawk moths. What really attracted my attention is the fact that they eat lantana, which has really gone nuts this year with the extra rain.

It seems that most people regard them as a pest, but to me they are just another discovery to be fascinated by in the garden… especially if they eat lantana.

Sourdough – zepole

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We have a lot of eggs at the moment, dozens sit waiting for something to do. Looking at these egg cartons, I decided I needed something deep fried and made with eggs. This recipe seemed to be as good as any.

Sourdough zepole

Ingredients

2 eggs

1 cup ricotta

1/2 cup sourdough discard

1/2 tspn vanilla extract

1 cup all purpose flour

2 tspn baking powder

1/4 cup sugar

pinch of salt

oil for frying

Method

Mix all ingredients well until batter is stiff enough to not fall from a spoon. Preheat oil, drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot oil and fry until golden to dark brown. If the pieces are large leave them in the oil for longer to be sure they are cooked throughout. Drain on paper towels and dust with cinnamon sugar.

What an easy, if messy, way to use some eggs, sourdough discard and time.

They tasted really good and lent a festive air to dinner. I will definitely be making more.

Easier sourdough brownies

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My daughter has discovered that she can eat egg again (in very small amounts), this means that baking just got easier. The first recipe I changed is (of course) my sourdough brownies. The new recipe is quick and easy, oh, and yummy. In my first batch I used a quarter of a cup of dock seed flour (of course), which made the colour really dark and prevented any rising of the batter at all during cooking, so the texture is rich and dense.

Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup vegan butter (melted)
  • 1/2 cup chocolate chips (vegan)
  • 3/4 cup Sourdough Starter can be unfed or active and bubbly
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 3 Eggs
  • 1 tspn Vanilla Extract
  • 1/2 cup Cocoa Powder
  • 3/4 cup All Purpose Flour
  • pinch Salt

Method

Melt the choc chips and butter together, then add the sourdough starter, eggs and vanilla extract.

Slowly add the rest of the ingredients and mix the pre-brownies until combined. Pour into a lined slice tin and pop into a medium oven for about 30 minutes. Take the tin out of the oven, let the brownies cool, then serve (or eat quietly and quickly in the kitchen).

Making Yorkshire Puddings

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While I was having an adventure in the UK, I came across something I have never tried before: Yorkshire pudding. They taste so light and fluffy, with just enough oil to make them interesting. I am a little addicted to the taste and texture. My aunt told me they were ‘Somewhere to put the gravy’ and that seems to be the traditional way of serving them.

The Yorkshire pudding is the blob on the top left.

I decided to give them a go when I got home. This recipe is the one I used to experiment. The first batch were amazing in shape and tasted really good, but I left them in the oven too long so they were a bit burned.

They tasted good enough for me to try making them again, and I have been making them daily for a week now. Yes, I am putting on weight. My daughter has discovered that they are good for all sorts of things, not just gravy.

She put some jam into the pocket and filled it up with vegan whipped cream.

She filled the cup with stir fried vegetables (heavy on the garlic).

I filled them with roast vegetables and cheese sauce.

I did wonder if I could try making a cob loaf filling for them too.

The possibilities are endless really. One day soon I am going to try a batch with half dock seed flour and half all purpose flour.

My recipe is really simple;

Ingredients

4 eggs

1 cup milk (soy or oat for me)

1 cup flour (any)

1/2 tspn salt

vegetable oil

Method

Put a small dash of oil into all 12 cups in a muffin tin, then put the tray into a hot oven to heat.

Put the eggs and milk into a bowl or a wide jug and whisk until smooth.

add the salt and flour to the bowl and whisk until the mixture is smooth.

Take the very hot muffin tin from the oven and pour the mixture into each cup as quickly as you can. Put the tray back in the oven for about 15 – 20 minutes. Don’t open the oven at all during the cooking time. Once they are cooked, take them out of the tray and let them cool, or eat them straight away.