Saving Flax Seed: Days to Maturity

This is the next installment about the USDA germplasm project I have been working on this year. In this post I will discuss the definition of “days to maturity”, which was one of the pieces of information I was supposed to be tracking for the USDA. I will also share some of my thinking around how I decided to harvest seeds this summer.

Since there has been a significant lapse of time since my last flax-related post, I will quickly recap. In this first season of the project, I was hoping to increase our supply of seed. I tried to prevent cross pollination by using isolation cages made out of lightweight Agribon and wooden stakes. Half of my project suffered utter crop failure in mid-July due to predation by rodents (or possibly other unidentified flax-stalk chewers and flax-seed eaters). Luckily, the other half of the project escaped largely unscathed, thanks to better weeding, daily monitoring, and cat-pee soaked scraps of cloth pinned to the isolation cages. You can read my earlier posts from April to August of 2015 for more details. Continue reading “Saving Flax Seed: Days to Maturity” →

The Hurrier I Go

Life has been very busy. Back in July I kept thinking, “July is the month of everything.” Dye plants blooming, flax needing to be harvested, NEH summer institute, NEWS, family weekend at Queen Lake, hiring a new co-worker at school…. I did a lot, but since I can’t do everything, I had to let a lot of things go. No goldenrod or Queen Anne’s lace dye baths this year, and I missed Peggy Hart‘s talk on the history of NEWS, for example. (12/30/2023 Edited: Here are updated links to the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute and New England Weavers Seminar.)

Then when August came, I thought, “No, August is the month of everything.” Even *more* dye plants blooming, flax *really* needing to be harvested, prepping for school, getting to know my new co-worker….  I did a lot, but ditto July. I had to let a lot of things go. No flax retting experiments. No purple loosestrife or black walnut experiments, despite an absolutely ridiculous abundance of wild dye plants. Very few orange cosmos flowers were collected and frozen. No woad was cut or dyed with. The flax and linen study group website was not updated. Continue reading “The Hurrier I Go” →

Japanese Indigo Vat At Last

Last year at the Massachusetts Sheep and Woolcraft Fair I bought several Japanese indigo plants (Polygonum tinctorum, though I’ve heard that perhaps the name has changed). I was very excited and intended to dye with them, but then next thing you know, summer had raced past and they were blooming. I was worried that they would have lost a lot of their color once they started to bloom. And I was worried that I might have a hard time finding plants or seeds again. I decided I’d save them for seed and not use them for dyeing after all. You can recap a couple posts from last year here. And here.

This spring I successfully grew about 40 seedlings, half of which I put in at Bramble Hill Farm and the other half at our community garden plot. I guess I was in a “don’t put your eggs in one basket” mode this spring. Very wise, as it turned out. Continue reading “Japanese Indigo Vat At Last” →

Woad, Weld, Rain and Humidity

It is now mid-July, a time of year which is inevitably humid here in Massachusetts and often rainy. It is also a peak time of year for harvesting many dye plants. The problem is, when it’s humid and/or rainy, where do you hang them up to dry? Not outdoors….

Here are the woad seeds I saved from the dye plant and fiber plant garden at Bramble Hill Farm. This was from just two or three plants, harvested on July 2, 2015. We had been having a dry spell and they had almost entirely dried on the plants before I cut them off. Yes, I do already have a lifetime supply of woad seeds, and yes, they stay viable for a pretty long time. But here’s my crop of woad seeds for 2015. They are very beautiful, in my opinion.

July 2 woad seed harvest Continue reading “Woad, Weld, Rain and Humidity” →

Japanese Indigo Take Two

After realizing my mistake with the first attempt at growing Japanese Indigo seedlings, I tried again. On April 25th, I laid out some seeds to sprout in damp paper towels. I’ve used this technique with beans before, but I didn’t think to try it with the Japanese indigo seeds until I heard from Laura Harris, a fellow Seed Savers Exchange member to whom I sent some of my seeds earlier in the spring, that she had done it. And ta da! Success!

Here are a couple photos of the seeds once they germinated.

May 1 Japanese indigo seeds sprouting

May 1 Japanese indigo seed germination Continue reading “Japanese Indigo Take Two” →

Japanese Indigo Take One

On Sunday April 19th I decided to start some of my Japanese indigo seeds. You may recall that I was able to save a substantial quantity last fall. I ought to have started them weeks ago, perhaps even months ago. However, earlier in the spring it was hard to believe that the snow would ever melt so I just couldn’t handle seed starting. This past weekend, it was gloriously warm and it was clear that spring had triumphed at last. So, I figured it was better late than never.

I borrowed a teeny cold frame from school, which has been sitting in the basement over there for years. It needed a little washing and reinforcing. I used our very own compost mixed with potting soil, planted seeds in little six-packs, watered them, and set them in the warm sun. The cold frame is on the wagon is so we can move it around to keep it in the sun, and bring it indoors easily at night.

April 19 Japanese indigo Continue reading “Japanese Indigo Take One” →

Planning a Linen Warp

After I spun up that modest quantity of linen singles yarn (the bleached Louet top I wrote about last time), I got excited about planning a warp for it. I plan to use the handspun as weft. My current thought is to use the wet and dry spun yarns in alternating stripes in the weft. I think this will create stripes of different textures. But what to use for the warp?

I have a motley stash of naturally dyed linen yarns, including 20/1, 20/2 and 40/2 yarns. This project seemed like a good opportunity to use some of it. Since most of my dyeing consists of experiments and small batches, I don’t have a lot of any one color. So, I can’t make the whole warp from a single color, which obviously means I need stripes in the warp. Continue reading “Planning a Linen Warp” →

Bookmark Success!

After I wove off that pink warp, dyed with madder, I finally put a new warp on the loom. It’s a blue warp, dyed with woad, for more “Jack Frost” pattern bookmarks. Amazingly enough, the first three came out exactly the same length! This is a feat of consistency of which I am rarely capable, so I was pretty happy. Here they are:

consistent weaving

What I have been aiming for in my bookmarks is a woven length of 10 inches, with 1 inch of fringe on each end. This allows them to fit exactly into the stylish wrappers Matthew designed, which are 12 inches long. Continue reading “Bookmark Success!” →

Bookmark Failures (Successes Coming Soon)

This post is the latest installment in a longer saga about weaving bookmarks with naturally dyed 40/2 linen. The saga spans many months, if not years. I have posted about these bookmarks in the past. You can read my most recent post about it here.

Or you can just catch up on the back story in this post!

My linen bookmarks are woven with 40/2 linen. They are not too time-consuming to produce, though the pricing still works out to a meager hourly rate when I take into account all the steps involved in the dyeing plus the weaving. Continue reading “Bookmark Failures (Successes Coming Soon)” →

Three Bags Full

About a month ago I was tidying up the crafts room. I was trying to get organized so I could weave a new crop of “Jack Frost” bookmarks before the winter holidays.

The crafts room is the room in our apartment which houses my loom, all my yarns, dried dye plants, dye equipment and materials, niddy noddy, swift, scales, carders, and drop spindles. It also contains two large book shelves full of books, a desk, a small filing cabinet, bookbinding supplies and tools, two antique scutching knives and an antique hetchel. The crafts room also contains a lot of dyed fleece and spinning fiber, hand-woven items, notebooks with all my dyeing, weaving, and teaching records, and some fiber magazines. Also, it’s where I store plastic bins with samples and materials for various fiber arts activities that I teach, and an ironing board and iron. And lots of other stuff like dye plant seeds and the beater and reeds for a 40 inch Macomber loom that’s been occupying my mom’s laundry room for a year while I try to figure out what to do with it. I know, that is a nutty list, and I didn’t even list everything. It is in a fairly chronic state of chaos. Continue reading “Three Bags Full” →