dye dye dye!!!! flowers and ice and everything nice..

i did an ice flower dye the other day!  the first one of this year.  i was hoping to get some nice bedding plants so that i would have some good flowers for stuff, but ugh.  not so much.  i did buy some violas and some pansies, so that's good!  but not much else..  i got some rudbekia that i think are orange today, so that's something!  maybe?  but anyway.. here we go!

i put all sorts of different things on this one!  some peonies, some rose petals, some yellow lilies, some of those pea vine type flowers, a few chive blossoms, a couple spent iris blossoms, a few bunches of comfrey flowers, and of course some violas and pansies!  i also tried putting a few yarrow leaves in there.
the method for this is simple, you put the flowers on the wet cloth (this cloth was unmordanted, i had some old alum liquid from a previous mordant and i soaked it in that for a few min though) fold or roll it up tightly and tie if you need to and then freeze it.  once it is frozen you can take it out and thaw it in some water.  i have never tried just thawing it on the shelf, i should do that next time.  i also squeeze it pretty good.  then ta-da!  (it works extremely well with hollyhocks!)
so.. this is what it looked like today..

ta-da!  it was starting to get a little dark and there was a sorta ominous wind starting up...eek!

violas and pansies always make wonderful colours!  blues and greens and sometimes purples, depending on what colour they are.

the peonies didnt do much, but sometimes they left a little bit of an outline.  i didnt really think they would do a whole lot, they usually dont.  sometimes they make some nice colours on paper though!
you can see that pea vine flower there though, it lost all it's colour, but i dont really know where it went?
the lilies didnt really make prints so much, but there's yellows in there in general, so they did something i think!

that clump of stuff is the comfrey flowers, and they left some pinky brownish spots.

it's pretty colourful!  so that's good.  i am not sure how much of it will wash out.  i expect that some of the darker blotches might wash out a bit.. who knows.

capilano park herb walk

i went on a plant walk the other week.  it ended up being a rather blustery wet and snowy day.  it really was not all that bad though!  it was relatively warm, and even though i came home rather wet and kinda tired, i had a good time!

we learnt about trees!  several types of trees.  i actually maybe didnt get the best pictures of all the trees, but that's alright.
first was poplar!  i was happy about this because she discussed the 2 different types of poplar trees that around there.  i had noticed earlier this season the two types but didn't know the exact difference or how to tell them apart and now i do!  there is the aspen poplar or trembling aspen, which is the more.. delicate? of the two and also has some little pussy willowy type things on it in the spring that i had noticed.  it had these long fuzzy things that were soaked at this time.

she said that poplar is in the willow family, which has salicylic acid?  which has pain relieving properties.  also, she said that that the branches of the aspen poplar was used by...i forget who? to set bones.  to me it seems like it might partly be because it had very straight branches, but i dont know?
and the balsam poplar, which is rather huge and has big sticky kinda ugly looking buds!

i didnt really take a picture of the tree i guess?  except for this..

then she showed us some hazelnut!  i didnt know what hazelnut looked like, and there were a whole bunch around, so i am looking forward to checking it out later on in the year when it has leaves and whatnot.  they were bushes and they had cute little cone type things and really neat little pink flowers!

then she talked about dogwood for a bit..  with it's pretty pretty red branches!  for the life of me i can't remember what she said about it though..   ugh.

earlier in the year i picked a small branch of it and put it in a cup of water along with my pussy willow branch that sprouted leaves and it started sprouting leaves right away!  so i've got a branch of it with pretty little green leaves at home!

next was pine..  and she also talked about the sap that they drip out..   i think she said that pine had antiseptic type properties.  but i'm sick and my brain is a little wonky.

next she talked about willow.  she spoke of the willow bushes down by the river bank, there are lots of tall stick like bushes with small thin leaves that grow along the river bank, which are a type of willow.  we didnt go down there and look on account of it being super duper wet and slippery, so i didnt get a picture, the best i got is this...

in which you can't even really see what i'm talking about.
around where we stopped and talked about the willows i took a picture of a bud for my tree tracking project though..

it belonged to this tree..

and i may be totally wrong, but if my memory serves me correct i think that it very well may be a willow!  i didnt walk down that way too too often last year, but i think there was a big willow tree over there and it kinda looks like a willow from the way the trunk and the branches are shaped too?

lastly she talked about birch!  the paper birch.. and ya know, i didnt take a picture of that birch tree at all!  the poor birch she showed us had been banded..  i dont know why someone would do that?  you can kill a tree doing that..  but it seemed to be doing alright, so that's good!  it's a shame to kill a tree, especially for something as stupid as getting a little piece of birch bark.
after i just walked around a bit and took more pictures..
there was lots of interesting and pretty things to see!
like some interesting tree trunks..

and water droplets everywhere!!!

i stopped to take a picture of a hole in this tree.. cause, i'm not sure why..  but just because..

and this chickadee came up to see me!  i was taking the picture with my phone (i took most of the pictures with my phone cause it was raining/snowing, and i'd rather that get wet than my camera) and this chickadee kept coming right up close, i got out my camera but i got only one clear shot of it's rear end.  it's back end with his tail up, so nice.  then it flew away and i waited but it didnt come back.  but i got some nice phone pictures!

on the ground i saw these bubbles..

and some pretty scenery..

the walking bridge was all snowy..  so much snow.. it's supposed to be spring and green.. and bleh..

the nice snowy river valley..

and then home to dry off and warm up and it was good friday, so everyone came over and we dyed easter eggs!

dolly daydreams

so, i went to this new dollar store today..  it was an actual "dollar store" but it had a lot of things that were more than a dollar... a lot more than than a dollar.  dollarama now goes up to $4 which kinda sucks, but this dollar store had stuff up to probably $20 for sure...  it had lots of stuff though.
the first row i went down was a big row of toys!  lots and lots of toys!  and i found these:

dolly daydream!  clean fun!
with all sorts of cleaning supplies..  this one's got a mop and bucket..

this one's got a washing machine and an iron and who knows what else..
cause what little girl doesn't just dream the day away of just cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning..  and.. oh the good clean fun!~

tree - bur oak

oak trees are lovely.  at my folks place we have one in the front yard that we planted when i was young, it's pretty tall now, but i suppose it's still pretty small.  every summer these bluejays come to eat all the acorns from it, they are relentless!  they chase away the squirrels, the magpies, anything!!! those are their acorns!!!

some oak trees in a park downtown, in the fall they turn a brownish colour

oak are fairly simple to identify cause they have super duper uniquely shaped leaves.  most of the oak trees in the city here are bur oak, a type of white oak with rounded leaves (as opposed to red oak, which have pointy leaves, or at least that's how i understand it..)

i couldnt find any acorns on the trees, it's fairly late in the season and animals must have got to them..  but there were a whole bunch of the little tops left on the ground

oak is a really good dye plant.  the leaves produce nice shades of browns and even blacks with iron mordant.  another weird thing with oaks that has dye potential is oak galls..  i have seen pictures of big huge ones, but maybe those are on other types of trees?  but here i have only seen little ones..  i took a picture but it's blurry (i thought it was in focus or i woulda taken another, oops!)

oak galls are a weird sorta thing where wasps (or other insects?) have laid eggs and the tree produces something (the gall i guess) around it as a reaction of sorts.. afterwards the insect breaks out, see the little hole!
oak (or other) galls are used as a mordant in dyeing, but i have some ethical questions about it and have not been able to find a lot of information.  what i wonder is is when they are collected, do they just collect them off the tree at random with the insect inside?  or are they collected at a time in the year when it is certain that there are no insects inside?  personally, i wouldnt want to be willfully killing anything for the things i make, so i just dont know?