no photos yet

i am having trouble with internet. there has been someone working on phone lines in our street for the past week or so, and we keep getting crossed wires and the internet cutting out. so i havent been able to have enough internet time to upload any more photos.

dream garden

my dream garden will be in my hometown, gisborne. i will grow many kinds of fruit and nut trees, the ground covered with lupins, lavender, thyme, comfrey and chooks.... and a big higgeldy piggeldy vege garden, full of delicious food and flowers, buzzing bees and beautiful butterflies....and native trees full of birds and geckos gorging themselves on juicy berries and sweet nectar. this is my allotment to go next to the 200 others who follow india flints blog. i hope they all spill over to one another and the whole community can share the many foods and beauty of all countries.

the above pictures are of my real garden last spring. beautiful, but sadly this year extremely salty windburnt and dry.

tomorrow i am hoping to find time to update about my dye results(yes i know i said that ages ago, but now i am finally finished studies for the year!)

pohutukawa stars

i found myself in a pot of pohutukawa stars!
arent they beautiful? as i was taking some fabric out of the pot i saw these stars floating and wanted to photograph them. they are the fallen seed pods from the pohutukawa tree in our front yard. one day i was out walking after a rainfall and saw on a pale concrete driveway the seedpods bleeding their colour.



this is a small watercolour drawing of pohutukawa. at the left is the base of the flower that turns into the seedpod.



above are my samples of griselina littoralis. they are a bit redder than they seem on the computer. below the pinky red is the eco-print. my good friend rachelle put me on to this plant after discovering it at a workshop at summer school in kapiti with india flint.





this is a little line of my samples pegged up in the sunroom window to test for lightfastness.

most of the colours i have so far are varying shades of brown, although i found that windfallen karo flowers gave a nice soft pink. when i added a piece of metal, hoping to get purple, i ended up with silvery grey.

i swear the blue is bluer in real life!

blue passion

when i got back from gisborne (now a few weeks ago) i was excited to open up a bundle i had left sitting in a copper pot of seawater.

blue! passionfruit skins. i was jumping round the house with excitement. isnt it just like magic when you open up a bundle and something unexpected or secretly hoped for shows itself to you?



i have finally got started on the actual dyeing of my native dye project. i have several pots going, sitting quiet over night. will try and get photos on here asap. there are one or two very promising looking brews.

gisborne sunshine

just a quick note. i am up in sunny gisborne spending time with family. what a beautiful day! it feels like summer already. tomorrow morning will be going down to the farmers market- check it out here on my sisters blog and you can see green blessings (my mums handmade herbal teas, tinctures and ointments) here .
have a great weekend!

gosh, i cant believe how long its been since i last posted. does not bode well for keeping you all interested. i am wishing really hard for a laptop to fall in, well into my lap. my husband and i are both studying and we have one not so great computer to share between us. so if anyone knows the computer gods...
i am currently in my final year (which actually wont finish till next year as i am part-time now) of studying for my Bachelor of Applied Arts. last year i won a scholarship to research natural dyes in New Zealand. i am finally getting stuck into this research properly. i have done quite a bit of experimenting with native plants, particularly the magical pohutukawa windfall flowers...

pohutukawa on pure wool jersey


pohutukawa leaves on indeterminate wool blend


i love working with pohutukawa. i only pick the fallen flowers as i wouldnt want to deprive the birds or bees of food.
with my research i am looking at traditional Maori methods and materials for dyeing, as well as using contemporary methods and trialling native plants that may or may not have been used before. new zealand dyers have tried a huge variety of native plants, particularly on wool. i will be focusing on gaining colour without the use of toxic mordants such as chrome, tin and copper crystals. india flint has taught me about using natural pre-mordants such as soy, sea water, ash water and many more possibilities, as well as co-mordanting by cooking up dyestuff in pots of different metals.
i would love to hear from anyone who has experimented with nz native plants for dyeing on any fibres.





these two images are some of my work with seaweed, the first on wool at indias workshop (with pohutukawa samples next to it), and the second a long slow eco-print in a cold pot of harakeke pod dye.





these two images are... a pot of purple maori potato dye, amazing colour in the pot... and linen sample, unfortunately came out quite pale, maybe silk would hold the colour better.

these are just some of my experiments so far. over the next few months i will be trialling a range of mordants and plant dyes, and testing them for light and wash fastness. i shall keep you posted.

p.s. i have three paintings for sale on Felt.co.nz (sorry if anyone tried the link before and got to a cycle website, whoops!) now. and i have a bit of a blog on Wardrobe Refashion.

so... if anyone has a laptop they would like to barter for art, or has some interesting native dye results or knows anything about traditional Maori dyes, especially paru (iron-rich mud), i would love to hear from you.
i will put my email in the side bar if any one wants to contact me direct.