Agaricus bisporus

a couple of weeks ago while preparing to wander off to Aotearoa for some felt and dye workshops i stumbled across a large Portobello mushroom, sadly too far gone for eating

i placed it on a piece of folded silk, left the country and promptly forgot about it. my children sent the odd text message bearing tidings of beetle invasions and general "festiness"

so i thought i'd share the photos of what happened....

this last one is after rinsing. i suspect the colour would have been stronger had i steamed the silk before washing...

on hold

it's pretty dry at Hope Springs. the water in the dams has run out and we have a couple of bores left for the cattle.

this was once a nice little pond with fish and waterlilies.

this post isn't in the nature of a complaint, just an explanation for the lack of activity on the Tinctoria Australis front.

the rainwater that we have left is being saved for drinking... so there's not a great deal of experimenting happening at present. so for now and for me the project is definitely on the backburner. 

it was a nice idea, but not all nice ideas work out!

best wishes all, see you when it rains [if it remembers how!]

sunday at the cedars

India is delighted to announce a new workshop series to be held at The Cedars in Hahndorf, South Australia.

This historic property was the home of the celebrated Australian landscape painter Hans Heysen, a far-sighted environmentalist as well as an artist, who purchased parcels of land surrounding his home to ensure the survival of the magnificent eucalypts he loved so much.

The first workshop - Botanical Alchemy - will be a one-day introduction to ecologically sustainable plant dyes for textiles on Sunday March 8, 2009. 

for more information please email me via this link

Yellow Box

Native dye sample data sheet.


Yellow Box or Eucalyptus melliodora.

Reference: page 369, Leon Costermans, Native Trees and Shrubs of South-Eastern Australia.

The leaves were boiled for around 45 minutes in an aluminium pot.

The first three samples were completed over three days with no mordant in a stainless steel pot. Each sample added to the warm dye bath then heated for 30 minutes then cooled overnight in that dye bath.

The last two samples were using the same dye bath after the addition of half a teaspoon of carb soda. They were steeped in the dye bath for an hour or so, and not cooled in the dye bath overnight.





Botanical data sheet.

Drooping cassinia or Chinese Tea-scrub

Cassinia arcuata is a common spicy aromatic shrub 1-2m. It usually occurs on disturbed waste ground in the box-ironbark forest.

Reference : page 288 Native Trees and Shrubs of South Eastern Australia - Leon Costermans

Here is the botanical reference sheet and the dye sample data sheet.

Please note that the finishing date is not on the dye sample data sheet because the bulk of the wool is still in their respective pots and I will post another page to this data if there is any substantial colour change after several days of soaking in the dye tincture.

Here is a photo of Cassinia arcuata growing insitu.

geraldton wax

have been delighted to discover that Chamelaucium uncinatum (Geraldton Wax) cuttings in rainwater respond nicely to prolonged exposure to copper scrap by producing pleasant green shades on wool (sadly the image doesn't do true justice to the colour)

and as a bonus the dye liquid retains the delicious fragrance of the foliage

acacia and appendix

driving along a road in the Mount Lofty ranges recently i suddenly noticed that this summer (which has been made memorable by a lack of precipitation) seems to have offered perfect conditions for the rampant take-over of roadside plantings of Cootamundra (Acacia baileyiana) by the parasite plant which I think is Amyema linophylla ssp. orientale. if anyone has better information (about the specimen on the right) please let me know (via comment)