Quaking aspen is called “popple” in my area. You don’t often read about aspen as a natural dye material. But it’s in my own yard and it’s abundant. That’s enough reason for me to test it.

The popple catkins wrapped in silk in the baggie on the left released pink as soon as the vinegar hit them. That sample should be ready to remove from the baggie next week. We’ll see how the color changes when it oxidizes.

While not as bright as the baggie bundle, the “ashes of roses” color on the right is really more my style. That came when I substituted (low) heat for time: I added catkins to plain (hard) water in an aluminum pan, added the silk, and slowly brought it up to a not-quite simmer (about 150-160 degrees F). Again, we’ll see how the color changes over time.

Last year, spring came early and the popple catkins were out the third week of March. This year, spring is a bit late and they’re out the first week of May.

The most fragrant of my willow catkins are just now coming out, too. We have another experiment going with those. Each summer, Bill gathers petals from the Thérèse Bugnet rose in our yard. He soaks the petals in rum to extract the flavor, then mixes the extraction with simple syrup to make a cordial we enjoy sipping in the winter. We’re hoping to capture the fragrance of early spring with our willow “Catkin Cordial”.

I’m ignoring this morning’s freezing rain. With catkins and crocuses in bloom here, it’s officially spring. What’s blooming in your yard?

Over the weekend, we tackled a couple of jobs in the yard that yielded some dye material for the studio.

The underside of this lichen is a dark brown.

First, I cleared out fallen limbs from the grove of trees across from my studio. A neighbor wants to get the old hay rake out of there. He’ll refurbish it and sell to the Amish, who use horse-drawn equipment.

Then we pulled out some fencing and old cedar fence posts.

Every time I mention lichen dyeing, someone points out ethical concerns related to harvesting them. Lichens convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into oxygen. And they’re important indicators of the health of an ecosystem. There are very good reasons to resist the inclination to scrape every last lichen off the rocks, trees and tombstones in your neighborhood. But these lichens were salvaged from wood that’s going to be burned next winter when there’s snow again. In her book Lichen Dyes, Karen Diadick Casselman calls this “salvage botany”.

One one trip to the brush pile, I stepped on this piece of bark covered with lichens. So I salvaged it for a little experiment.

Dye references say to scrape lichens off bark which can muddy the colors the lichens yield. Makes sense. But I want to see what happens to this silk fabric, which I wrapped around the lichen-encrusted bark I found. I added about 1/4 cup non-sudsing ammonia and 1/2 cup of water to the jar, which is loosely capped. I’ll give it a shake every day and see what happens.

Overnight, we got a little rain. So this morning, it was very easy to scrape the lichen off the other salvaged wood that had been sitting outside my studio.

I added the same ammonia-water solution to two jars of chopped lichen. I’ll give those jars a daily shake, as well, to extract the color.

This is my first attempt at the ammonia fermentation extraction method. I’ll keep you posted.

This was in the wash the last time I did a load of whites.

It’s a silk handkerchief I quickly knotted around an egg while dyeing Easter eggs with some dried bracken leaves and onion skins.

For years, I’ve been testing surface design media and techniques under the toughest conditions I could imagine: By washing them with the whites and tumble drying. Usually, that means undies. Let’s just say it didn’t even occur to me to boil my eggs and undies at the same time.

The onion skin dye is holding up beautifully after repeated washings. And I just may be a convert from cotton hankies to silk.