Jane Wheeler's Blog 2014 April

next step

Posted jane -->on 26th Apr 2014

there are carpets of spring flowers everywhere here; another winter with plenty of rain, especially in february, and then a lot end of march/early april.

it’s very lush, with nightingales singing on every corner, accompanied by the percussion section of sardinian warblers and corn buntings, though sometimes all you can hear from my house is about ten blackbirds singing at full blast.

I have been spending some time finishing a failed Julian Roberts subtraction cutting top – I’ve turned it into a dress. I learnt a lot from the attempt, except that I don’t quite understand how the circular holes thing works; however I had too small a tube for it anyway. I am not sure that anyone would be brave enough to wear this one, the draping is a little odd at the back.

I stitched circles into lines and ended up with lots of weird drapey things happening – a perfect candidate for further exploration of local plant contact prints and dyes.

a large selection of flowers and leaves folded into it – corn marigold, vipers bugloss are the magenta flowers, camomile, ilex oak and olive twigs, plus some local eucalyptus leaves and buds.

I wasn’t expecting these to give colour so much as impressions and possibly negative prints

and not a lot on the already dyed velvet; it is viscose and silk and only gains subdued effects with the best dyeplants.

it made a big fat bundle, so I cooked it with the windfall encina (ilex oak) leaves for rather longer than usual … hard to tell whether this was a good idea or not.

sopping wet. it took a while for the detail to show up

it’s all quite low-key

mainly a purple-ish brown, with little patches of greenish yellow, and needs to be seen on a person. it has become rather longer – really I should have dried it flat.

but lots going on, and encouraging. I put it on this morning, and it is quite a flattering frock, though I would prefer it about three inches shorter.

perhaps when I wash it and dry it flat it will go back to the original length. my conclusion is that less is more and I should go for a few stems of marigold another time with the ilex leaves and perhaps some olive.

now I have a repeat dress to sew, lots of work, it has a lining … and lots of cotton fabric to assemble, plus more testing, all the while in a dream of delirious beauty – mountain-side, birdsong, flowers … it’s the most beautiful place I know of.

(6 comments)

hoopoe nursery

Posted jane -->on 26th Apr 2014

here I am back in extremadura, and with my winter’s experience of dyeing with plants in Norfolk, excited about trying and retrying things from our local flora. I’ve been back to the big eucalypts (species unknown) nearby and collected some windfalls, and (not really such a good thing) picked some leaves with pretty gumnuts, or flower buds, actually, attached …

here are the actual nuts in case anyone can identify this tree for me.

everywhere is smothered in corn marigolds which seemed a good prospect for colour, so I picked one here, one there on my return walk, and a few sprigs of spanish broom which is related to the dyers broom used widely in the british isles for yellows in the medieval period.

I made some test bundles, including cork and ilex oak sprigs with some catkins on, and boiled all in a bath of windfall ilex oak leaves, pretty dry and brown, with my usual selection of scrap iron. I used iron is some of the bundles too. this is the string end of a piece of wool gauze, which always takes colour very deeply. you can see a spring of ilex imprinted bottom left, and the yellowish colour is from corn marigold. nothing much from the broom though.

more corn marigold and a sort of negative print from olive twigs

the two pieces of wool gauze I dyed; the narrower one had a piece of iron sheeting with a leaf of villanosa wrapped round it, that’s the green on the dark blue. it’s a very ornate leaf, I must give it another go.

this is a piece of old linen pillowcase with the same sorts of things, the marigold is quite definite on this

while this piece of cotton has the eucalyptus leaves doing interesting negative things around the iron. all worth pursuing.

following the instructions from a recent birthday present, Lichen Dyes by Karen Diadick Casselman, I tested some of the lichens around my finca. there those on the rocks and those on the trees. the only one which turned red on its cut edge with bleach was this lobate sooty edged one, I need a good lichen book to identify it. there is a lot on my finca and around on the sierra, and it’s easy to take part of each plant (if you can call it a plant) without having to do any scraping off. Casselman’s instruction with this type of lichen is to put it in a closed jar with half water and half domestic ammonia (I used window cleaner) and the jar one third empty, shaking it five or six times a day for three weeks (or fourteen weeks in the case of the North American varieties). the liquid immediately turned a gratifying rich brown, and should turn deep magenta in a few days; if so it will give substantive purple, on anything, natural, cellulose, protein, and synthetic fibres.

as for the hoopoes, they are nesting in the base of an olive tree right in front of the house, and I have been hosting the full force of british birding at its finest. a camera trap was installed, and a hide, and there will be some fantastic photos. the parents are feeding every few minutes, a selection of insect life, mostly caterpillars and big fat beetle larvae. I was a bit worried by the azure-winged magpies hanging around yesterday, but the hoopoes must have seen them off. occasionally a chick can be seen with its head in one of the entrance holes; sometimes the parents are obviously feeding chick with their heads near the entrance, other times they enter at the front and leave from the back.

here’s the tree, with the hide in the background on the left, and the artificial perch which they use all the time. waiting with great excitement for the fledging – I hope to catch it. I get a very good view from the kitchen window.

(1 comment)

bluebells but no cuckoos

Posted jane -->on 14th Apr 2014

yesterday I walked to Bullfer Grove and was surprised and pleased to find the bluebells already in flower.

in the little quartered wood at the top of our road too, and the lane below Bullfer they are out …. last week it was the primroses …

a comma on the path beside the wood. I counted four orange tips on the lane in Sharrington, a spotted wood on our lane, and one in Bullfer grove, and a peacock in Bale.

glimpses of bluebells walking up beside the grove

a thrush singing intermittently

chiffchaff too

no scent, they are hardly open yet

but lots of colour

a blackcap warbling

new leaves

ferns with bright sprays unfurling

early purple orchids in their accustomed place

a view of yellow rape fields through the trees

how long before the beeches have their leaves on?

tall wild cherries in blossom all along the edge of the grove

then back to Bale, dodging holiday traffic across the A148, the Loke starred with celandines

while there are no leaves on the trees it is quite green underfoot

back in the village the ornamental cherries are supreme

lushy pink

and hello, is this a dye plant? if it is berberis darwiniensis then I may take a harvest later (with permission of course)

definitely a dye plant – quercus ilex

our beautiful spinney where once the pagan Bale Oak stood, sheltering flocks of sheep, herds of pigs, and a cobbler and his family …

though five trees have been severely pollarded and the rest are under suspended sentence, as the National Trust has insurance and responsibility issues; one bough broke off and left a huge dent in the road a few years ago.

between them the grass is spotted with violets, almost the same blue as the bluebells.

(no comment)

catching up on the dyeing experiments

Posted jane -->on 13th Apr 2014

I have not posted any more about my experiments with India Flint’s methods of dyeing with plants, but here is some catching up.

I bought some milky merino jersey which I have been finding pretty good for taking up dye, and with its more robust feel I think it’s quite good for scarves. it doesn’t come as a tube, and it has a definite twist, two things which make it a bit less suitable for the sort of dressmaking I am getting into. this piece got an initial treatment in a florist’s waste e. cinnerea dyebath all stitched up with shibori and then made into a loose bundle, which is the red rust part. then I soaked it in rainwater in my new iron cauldron, and finally bundled it with holm oak leaves. the result is painterly, but not floral and may well end up as a birthday present for my dear friend and neighbour Paul, who has been admiring it.

then a friend had to take down a big e. gunni which had been living happily in essex until it got wind rock this horribly windy winter. I got a packet of leaves in the post, which tested giving green prints like this, no sign of orange rusts. the vein pattern on this wool gauze sample is from the pot it was wrapped around, from the crawling glaze.

lacking a garment to dye I chopped off a piece of silky merino jersey (30% silk), keeping it as a tube, and wrapped it with the Essex leaves around the same pot, which is roughly cylindrical and fits into my dyepot, conveniently. this gives me a very nice long rectangle of resist wrapping with string. a few bits of beachcombed scrap iron add to the rectangle theme. on this side the gunnii leaves have produced a purplish print

but on the other side there was plenty of green. I managed to cut the upper part of a loose sleeveless dress out of it, and nothing was wasted. strips cut from the armhole shape made the edgings for armhole and neck

and this little pocket came from the piece cut for the front neck, while a side pocket came from the rest,

embellished with the silk and viscose velvet I added to make up the length.

I’m really quite pleased with this, though I do have to hem the velvet, it grew whiskers on one wearing …

I have been avoiding/ducking the issue of dyeing cotton, but recently I got a bit braver and pulled a few white cotton things out of my various stashes and hoards. this pillowcase has been dyed twice, the first time with holm oak and iron scrap after an iron bath, the second time with essex eucalyptus gunnii and florists waste e. cinnerea. it has also been washed, just to see what would happen – and nothing did. it’s much soberer than wool, but still pleasing.

since then I have done a couple more bundlings, one with the old cotton pieces, two tops, one of which acquired a pleasant mauveish grey with some not very leafy markings from the sequence of iron bath and bundling with holm oak, and the other, after similar treatment and then 2 weeks immersed in a jar, appeared to have a lot of the dark grey fall off it which sat on the bottom of the jar – interesting … above is a new organic cotton top which has had iron bath then bundling with essex gunnii, holm oak and scrap iron. quite a restrained effect.

an interesting mark from leaf blocking the rectangular piece of iron.

this dress has had two lots of bundling, the first with a tree fern leaf.

I wrapped it around a pot with a glaze of excessive amounts of copper, which did interesting things with the probably mildy acidic fern leaf. however I don’t think it was nice enough for the rather special dress, so I bundled again with the two sorts of eucalypt leaves at hand, and got a lovely rich but delicate and sober result.

yesterday I decided I would use up some of my leaf stock and try a longer boil, as this had produced a good result on some tests of wool gauze. so I sliced off the last but one shawl width from the milky merino (30% milk fibre) and indulged in a good sprinkling of very aged e. cinnerea leaves, and some stems I was given for Christmas, interlaced with e.gunnii stems and leaves, boiling it in a bath of holm oak leaves from our village spinney (thank you national trust) for an hour after a long slow build up, and then leaving it to boil on and gradually slow as the woodburner cooled after I went to bed.

this proved to be a good strategy, and when I opened it this afternoon I found wonderful almost red orange rusts.

I wrapped it round the pot with the crawling glaze again, so in some places I have those strange veiny marks.

back in Spain next week I’m looking forward to encina (sweet oak) catkins, yellow broom, and the eucalypts there which give golds and purples.

this is from alder catkins, after an iron bath, on milky merino. alder has lots of tannin. I’m also looking forward to trying alder leaves, and the little cones too. and the summer leaves of sweet chestnut, sycamore, oak … and all the other plants after a rather limited winter.

(8 comments)

four and twenty

Posted jane -->on 13th Apr 2014

I have had a good run over the last two weeks, making two medium sized pots from a six or seven kilo piece of clay, plus a small bowl every day.

one day I made four, but that was actually a bit much and I ended up with a very sore back. I’m getting old.

I have made the same shape over and over, with the clay quite soft; it’s half crank and half a speckled throwing stoneware clay with some sand thrown in, and as it stiffens up it becomes a bit unmanageable, so I worked with it as soft as possible, rolling the slab out first thing, getting the walls up by lunchtime, and then finishing them in the late afternoon or early evening. it turned out to be a nice rhythm of work, allowing for other things to be done in between.

it felt reasonably under control, though the clay didn’t always.

I was making bottles and flagons of my usual shape, a flattened oval base, and domed shoulder

and small neck or spout. some had clematis stem impressions (influenced by my favourite from the last firing).

a couple had combed lines

which will take the oxide well if that’s what I end up doing with them ..

but some will go into Nic Collins’ four day wood firing in the summer, and niches on the surface to collect melting ash would be useful.

I tried to make the incised lines as free as I could

the freest lines are in nature though, and I went back to the clematis stems several times.

these little stem bowls were made with the leftover bits and pieces and are pretty rough and chunky. definitely for woodfiring.

so now I have twenty four bottles drying that will end up about eleven inches tall, to bisc fire in May when I get back from Spain, and some of them will be glazed and get to Hatfield Art in Clay in early July. I would like to make some more as these are all in the same flecky clay, and really I need a variety of clay body colour, from dark to light, to work with various glazes and expand the colour repertoire. but I’m very happy with the shape, I think it’s satisfyingly soft and plump with the elegant neck shape – very feminine – good pots should have a confluence with the human body.

(1 comment)

violets galore

Posted jane -->on 12th Apr 2014

it has been the most beautiful spring here in north Norfolk. the flowers have responded to the mild and very wet winter, and the clumps of primroses in Cakes lane seem bigger than usual,

while on a sunny day the sweet scent of violets hangs around the patches of purple and white that stud the banks and ditches in Clip street.

two of these patches, a white, and a purple, will not see another spring. they are on an east facing vertical ditch-bank that is due to be dug up when they put the cable for the offshore windfarm electricity through here. I suppose on the scale of things it’s not very important, but it will be a sad thing for those of us who do notice these tiny details.

this is a piece of the white patch in question.

as for white flowers, the stitchwort has been starring the banks for a couple of weeks now. this is the lesser one.

the north wind we have now seems to have cut down the number of butterflies around

I saw this fresh and flippy comma soaking up sunshine earlier this week.

huge bumble bees seem to be the first pollinating insects, I see a lot of them on the rape crop I walk past daily, hoping that early contact will prevent the unpleasant symptoms I got last year on returning from Spain at the beginning of May. this field is very advanced

and I’m rather hoping the flowers will be over when I get back from my spanish trip this spring.

we still have a lot of blackthorn out, although the bushes in my garden dropped their petals a couple of weeks ago

other hedges of hawthorn have been greening since the last week of march

and the hedge bank growth is beginning to unfurl itself –

dogs’ mercury here

cowparsley in flower already …

pussy willows

and more primroses

violets galore

and just opening, jack in the hedge which attracts the orange tip butterfly.

in my garden I have clotted cowslips all over the grass where there’s no wear on it, and it’s not cut much

dwarf broad beans flowering – come on you bees!

and some faithful snakes head fritillaries in pots that come up every year when I have forgotten about them.

(2 comments)

a better firing but some disasters

Posted jane -->on 4th Apr 2014

I fired the kiln again this week, and after much thought over the last result, I parked cones amongst the pots, and was careful not to over-reduce the firing.

rather than the exit flame being the width of the remainder of the flue hole I kept it thin like this, with the pressure up (the temperature just didn’t rise without that pressure), and I started closing the flue off in the 900’s C, but no smoke and stink until I thought I had better make sure of a bit of reduction at 1060C, so I did for a while then backed off. no soak, Daniel Rhodes said not necessary, and I think I over-fired it a bit last time, so shutting it down before cone 11 started to move was better.

quite a bit of soot in the clay sealing the bricks, evidence of heavy enough reduction.

disaster number one – the clay holding one of the test cones on the shelves exploded – there must have been some air in it – and bits went all over the kiln.

this little bowl was ruined – a big chunk stuck into the glaze in the middle of it – and another had big enough crumbs in it that it’s a “second”.

even the top shelf had bits of clay all over it. the glazes must mostly have absorbed the tiny bits without them showing.

second disaster was this little bowl, which had been glazed before the last firing, but there was no room for it. the slip and glaze had raised themselves up off the pot in places .. this reactive crackle slip has nasty tricks up its sleeve if left. it vomited glaze all over the place

but the final effect is quite interesting and dramatic. all the glaze knocked off the batt wash on the shelf with no trouble.

I am looking for some different glazes. this is a recipe from Out of the Earth into the Fire, supposed to be a persimmon glaze, orangey red, like the Hamada Kaki glaze. however the original is made of crushed rock local to Mashiko, and there are various versions using normal western glaze materials. this has bone ash in it. I think my firing is too hot and too reduced to get the reds. also I don’t need to put it on so thick.

this little incense burner was at the top, but in the back corner, where there’s a bit less reduction. it has a lovely “tea dust” slightly metallic finish. I will have to try this again next time.

this is the star of the firing. it was on the top shelf at the front next to the flame, and it has just worked, a combination of the very deep clematis stem impressions, the dark clay, and the thickness of slip and glaze, plus the firing and location in the kiln.

this is my other favourite, with a very rich chun

the listening pod fired very well, and there were several good bottles and incense burners, more black clay ones as well as the chun.

I tried copper carbonate under the slip and got a rich greeny turquoise – not really my cup of tea.

these cones are 10 and 11 and I put several next to the flue wall in different places. this shows me that on the top shelf next to the flue is not a good place to put a pot unless I want cone 11 – a little hot for my chun. this is most likely why I got browny yellowy things happening to a couple of pots last time. the rest showed me that I’m getting good cone 10 temps except on the floor of the kiln.

I am happier with the big bowls this time, I put more slip on them, and more glaze. this grey stoneware one was on the top shelf and the inside glaze surface is actually amazingly un split and smooth. the other two are made in the grogged pink, which perhaps makes the slip react more.

I still like these a lot – I call this result frozen lace, they just have no practical use as bowls.

so a good result; I feel more confident of my ability to fire the kiln, and on the whole I think the persimmon is interesting and worth persisting with. the square plates were disappointing – the green/red glaze I used needs a darker clay body, putting on thicker, and not being squeezed into too small a space to allow the atmosphere in the kiln to work on it. however stacking on shells of Holkham beach worked – something to use another time. so, a few pieces to throw on the “shard mound”, and two or three which I might take to the shortlisting for the CPA professional membership next month.

(4 comments)

next step

hoopoe nursery

bluebells but no cuckoos

catching up on the dyeing experiments

four and twenty

violets galore

a better firing but some disasters

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