Gardening, Mixed Media Art

DIY Pigment Watercolor Paint with Flowers

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It’s the peak of summer here in the northern hemisphere and as my tomatoes struggle to live up to the perfection I’d imagined over winter, my flowers are filling vases, presses, dye vats, and now paint jars! About a month ago I signed myself up for Falling Off Tree’s Botanical Play Intuitive Painting with PH Modifiers class. I rarely take classes on anything, content (stubborn?) in my autodidact world where I’d rather teach myself with books or the internet, but I’m trying this new thing called trying new things.

Taken @ Falling Off Tree’s Botanical Play class.

The class was relaxed and fun, and I immediately went looking for supplies to experiment more. When you have ADHD you ideally learn to resist the siren song of buying every supply imaginable for your new hobby, so I opted for decent paper and cheap brushes. I’m already eyeing down watercolor sets and fancy brushes so my strength may only go so far.

For our purposes today, you’ll need water, paper, a paintbrush, and flowers.

When setting out to learn painting of any kind, I think it’s always best to swatch and play with values and color before trying to do anything else, so that’s mostly what I have to show you. I am not an experienced painter and you don’t need to be either! This is about spending time with plants and working your creativity muscles.

Let’s jump into the process!

Pansies (purple and blue), rose of sharon (purple), onion skin (yellow), and snapdragons (greenish yellow that dried to a grey)

The process of extracting pigment from plant matter often starts with hot water. You’ll want to tear up or chop your material and then pour some hot water from the kettle over it to steep. Unlike textile dyeing you will need just a small amount to paint, so I used double shot glasses. I let everything marinate for 15 minutes or so before I started to test them out.

TIP: You can use fresh or dried plant material so start saving for winter now!

The next fun layer to this process is adding PH modifiers such as lemon juice, vinegar (acidic) wood/soda ash (alkaline) or metallics (copper, iron, alum) to see how or if it affects the color. You’ll find these modifiers used throughout all natural pigment processes and while they’re all natural, be sure to check safety precautions for everything you use. Natural is not a synonym for safe!

Adding some madder and black walnut hull powders to the mix gave me some reds and browns to play with.

I took each color and painted three swatches, one for the paint as is, one for acid, and one for alkaline. You’ll notice quickly that the color of the paint wont necessarily match the color of the flower. Black pansies really show off how the dry down and use of modifiers can affect your final color result. You may even notice some colors continue to change after a day or so.

Without modification, the pansy produces a deep purple liquid that dries to a blue-green hue, but with lemon juice you’ll get a magenta paint that dries to a purple. Sprinkling some soda ash on the third swatch had a bleaching effect. You can see similar changes with the red snapdragon paint. For these reasons you’ll want to let your swatches dry before tackling a painting unless you’re ok with surprises!

Red snapdragons and “Black King” pansies (marked violet here) show how they change with lemon juice (2nd column) and soda ash (3rd column) modifiers. You can mix modified paints in separate containers or just drip/sprinkle them onto your wet swatch.
Use your swatch pages to play with value (light to dark) and layering (letting the paint dry and going back in to detail or darken) the 2’s here show the 2nd layer applied over a dry first layer.

I watched a couple of YouTube tutorials about watercolor basics and lost myself for a couple of hours just doodling and swatching. If you decide to try it, feel free to DM me on Instagram @its_pam_ela and show me how you made out!

If you’re wondering about storing leftover paint, I’ve had mixed results. Some of the lighter pigments didn’t keep in the refrigerator, but the more saturated paint such as that of the black pansy were still useable after 3 days.

Other tips:
-Tape down your paper with washi or masking tape so it doesn’t curl.
-Do a quick search on YouTube about wet-on-wet versus wet-on-dry, it makes watercolor make a lot more sense!
-Go for a watercolor specific, pointed quill brush over flat brushes. They hold water and make beautiful strokes.
-Don’t stop at flowers! Leaves, berries*, oak hulls, spices like tumeric and saffron all produce pigment you can paint with!

*careful with the poison sort!

Happy painting!

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Fiber, Gardening

How to Naturally Dye Wool with Marigolds

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I often hear people bemoan the musky scent of marigolds. 

Sometimes when I’m plucking a basketful of their dense, cheerful blooms I can almost understand. Every breath I take feels thick with their earthy perfume and I can feel every particle of pollen adhering to my nasal passages like iron filings to a magnet. 

I can’t join the marigold haters club however, because not only have marigolds adorned many of my warm memories of youth, they’re the first flower that I ever used to learn how to naturally dye wool. 

Feeling deliciously witchy on a hot summer afternoon, I brewed that first vat of dyestuff from a basket of bedraggled blossoms. As I lowered a hank of handspun wool into the amber-colored water, the world of gardening opened up again, revealing another layer of this connection to plants that I have felt since I was a child. 

With every skill I learn, every book I read, and every new plant I meet, the excitement renews. I’m a kid again, squatting in front of my mother’s marigolds without a care in the world.

I will never get tired of this, I think.

How to Prepare and Dye Wool with Marigolds

To dye wool with marigolds (or coreopsis, or dyer’s chamomile- which I often blended together) you’ll need at least a pint of blooms. You can pluck them as they’re passing their prime and either steep them into dye immediately or freeze them for later. I even had good results after leaving that first basket of flowers to languish on the porch for a day before steeping them.

wool yarn being washed to remove any lanolin
Before the mordanting, washing wool with wool wash is a good idea to strip any remaining “grease” (lanolin) that could prevent the dye from adhering to the fiber. I used a few drops of dish soap here, but it’s better to use a soap made for wool like Unicorn Power Scour.

Wool (as well as silk) are readied for dye in a process called mordanting. The word mordant comes from the Latin word “modere” which means “to bite”. Essentially you’re using a mordant to rough up the fibers and give them some “bite” to grab onto the pigment. An easy mordant to start with is alum combined with cream of tartar.

Some mordant examples (Measurements taken from The Weaver’s Garden)

Using 4 gallons of water for each 1 pound of wool, choose one of the following mordants

Silk uses the same mordant, but in smaller amounts. Cotton can be dyed without mordant, but is usually pre washed with washing soda to prepare the fibers to take up pigment better.

From there, the mordanted wool can either be rinsed and dried for later dyeing or put straight into a prepared dye bath where it’s heated to a simmer and then left to cool in the pot. It’s important to never stir or rapidly warm/cool wool during these processes, as it is prone to felting. Drop it in the pot, then leave it be!

my first attempts at both hand spinning and dyeing wool
My first three attempts at both hand spinning and dyeing wool

Making dye baths would become a weekly activity after that first pot, and I quickly dyed my way through all of my shoddily spun hanks of yarn, working from the worst to my more skilled attempts. By the end of fall, my cheerful marigolds had mildewed and my freezer was stuffed with frozen blooms for a future midwinter dye pot. I made a knitted basket out of that first hank which I still beam at every day. If you’re not a spinner, you can buy undyed yarn very affordably here.

a knitted basket from naturally dyed yarn

Growing a Dyer’s Garden at Home

This year’s dye garden will be more robust with options and I have been accumulating supplies to try other methods of using flower and plant pigments. Here’s a list of seeds I intend to plant for the 2024 season:

  • Marigold
  • Dyer’s Coreopsis
  • Tango Cosmos
  • Dahlia
  • Zinnia
  • Greenthread
  • Blue Butterfly Pea
  • Black Knight Scabiosa
  • Hollyhock (biennial) 
  • Hopi Black Dye Sunflower
  • Purple basil (great for flower pounding)
  • Indigo
  • Japanese Indigo
  • Madder
  • Woad
dyer's chamomile, an easy plant for dyeing natural fiber
Dyer’s Chamomile functions like marigolds and has the added ease of being a perennial plant in my zone 6/7 garden.

My favorite seed company for easy dye plant shopping and information is Grand Prismatic Seeds, but you can find many of these seeds elsewhere if they’re out of stock.

Follow my YouTube Channel and Instagram to see more of my dye tutorials and experiments!

(This post contains some affiliate links for your convenience, these provide me with a small commission if you choose to purchase through them at no additional cost to you.)

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Gardening

Growing Beyond the Salad

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In all the years I’ve been gardening (and the many years I spent researching before I had the soil to plant in), I’ve noticed a sort of “pipeline” with gardeners. The start with the idea of a home-grown salad, often planting only food crops and rarely giving much thought to companion planting, pollinators, or soil ph. But, if one follows this theoretical pipeline, it doesn’t stop there.

Usually the next stop on the dizzying, slippery slope of falling in love with growing plants, is flowers. Maybe you get a pack of zinnia while you’re out selecting lettuce, maybe you read about the many, MANY benefits of planting for pollinators while growing food. Maybe from there you stumble into the vast wealth of discoveries in the world of native plants. Maybe, like me, you continue to tumble further and further into herbal teas, pressed flowers, floristry, natural plant dyeing, and macro photography.

Here are the ways I’m taking it further this year, growing not just food but materials to make art, clothing, and a better environments for the local birds and insects.

Canning, Freezing, and Storing:

With grocery store prices skyrocketing, and supply-chain crises becoming the norm, the old joke about spending $100 to grow a few dollars in produce is losing its potency. Sure, if you’re installing a brand-new garden, or perhaps watering a sun-parched patch of salad garden in the Arizona heat, your cost of production might still be vastly higher than the output. But in my New England garden, I’ve figure out how to pull baskets of produce throughout the growing season that total up to a net savings when I grow through three seasons and can, dry, freeze, and store the bumper crops.

Dried & Pressed Flowers:

One of the most enchanting new passions gardening introduced me to is the artistry of floral arranging and preserving. I got started by pressing some spring violets and pansies in a small flower press from Amazon two seasons ago. Arranging them into a delicate glass frame brought me so much joy that I promised to increase my attention to drying flowers every year in order to build up material to work with throughout the bitter days of New England winter. My head is already spinning with the possibilities of framed art, resin work, and dried arrangements to keep and share.

Beneficial Insects & Wildlife:

I wrote a detailed blog post years ago about this long-established interest of mine to have the buzzing-est, flapping-est, chirpy-est garden in my city. The very first bed I installed in the formerly languishing lot on the property I rent was a native perennial garden. A few non-natives have found their way into that bed but largely it’s remained a love letter to local bees, birds, and butterflies- especially my beloved Monarch and Swallowtails. I made sure to plant enough that there are blooms from last frost to first frost and an abundance of seed heads and hollow twigs for winter survival. I don’t rake until May to keep my bumblebees abundant, and they return this kindness by helping me pull in baskets of beautiful tomatoes come July.

Tea, Spices, Incense, & Herbs:

What’s a witch without her stores of fragrant and powerful herbs? I’ve been hand grinding my own herb and resin incenses since I was a teenager, and to this day I do not use commercial incense in my home. Nothing compares to the smell of smoldering rosemary. (Be sure with all incense to ventilate your home!) I enjoy the whole-body hug that is a cup of mint and tulsi tea all winter long, and there is just something about crumbling your own thyme or cayenne pepper flakes into a pot of winter soup.

Natural Dyeing:

Here, sweet reader, is my newest special interest when it comes to plant selection! Over winter, my restless heart found comfort in a once-fanatical hobby from my 20s: knitting. Knitting again led to finding my hand spinning stash and I’ve also fallen back in love with spinning my own yarn for knitting and weaving. *Deep inhale* and that led me to realizing “I can grow dye plants and dye the yarn I spin”! Two trips to the library later I am ready to let the garden color my life in a whole different and quite literal way.

Photography, Video, & Income:

Finally, and perhaps this is obvious, the last way my garden will give me more than just a salad, is through my work with cameras. I make videos on Youtube, visually document on Instagram, and take portraits and nature shots with the flower-heavy backdrop of my dreams. My garden doesn’t just feed my body, it feeds my creativity. Every morning from the first sunny mornings of late winter until it’s too cold to be enjoyable, I take my coffee in the garden. Often the camera comes with me and I’ve got folders full of beautiful b-roll and striking photos of rabbits, bees, and birds to show for it. An unexpected and usually unplanned income bonus comes by way of selling my extra plant starts off every spring, usually funding the supplies I need for my late June succession planting.

What are some ways you can get more out of your garden this year? Leave me a comment, or drop by my YouTube video companion to this post and we can chat there!

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