Monday Madness

This is the evening view from my side yard. This is where my wonderful walnuts come from. Today was another interesting day of experimentation. I collected 20 walnuts in varying degrees of decay. All had some green on them but some had very very little. I put them all in my dye pot and boiled them on the stove for about thirty minutes and then extracted all the walnuts out othem and left the fibrous outsides in the pot. I took the walnuts and put them in another dye pot and proceeded to boil them and hoped to boil the fibrous membranes off of them but got distracted and had stepped away from the kitchen  for a while and realized that I had left them on medium heat ... aaaaccck....................i ran to the kitchen and was so sad to see that the pot was full of scorched walnuts.I added some water and took them outside for a bit and decided a little char may just add to the blackness haha. So I took some white paper to make some swatches of all the different dyes. The photos show the pots of dye good but the swatches were blurry so .. i'll have to try to take another one since they are dry now to see if there is a definitive difference in the shade of brown. Just had me curious. As I sat there doing that I realized that the plain walnut bath of dye had a soupy sort of consistency and had a rich reddish yellowish brown .. if thats a color and I loved it so I took a napkin ( i love plain white napkins with things on them for dyeing, I get them at thrift stores) and tied it up on a piece of wood and threw it in the pot and below is what that looks like .. I really really wanted to rip it off right then and there to see how it looks but I am going to wait till tomorrow when it will be all dry. But you can see how thick the dye is!  So I've drained some off to use inside tonight to paint with. I love it.. love this whole process love mixing and making messes ... haha which I am so so good at. 

I love how this looks and you can sort of see how thick this ink looks. Can't wait to use some of it. I put the pot back on the stove after I drained off the first bit of juicey ink and guess i better go check it.. hahah back it's ok and its thick and juicy for sure. I get so excited about the silliest things. Let's see .. i wanted to show and sort of before and after photo of another tree painting. I started it and wrote some things on it and then decided to make some additions. I like how it's progressing now. It's below.

Now if I don't like it I can't take any paint off haha. and I can't unstitch it. I can only paint over it which isn't always easy to do. 

If you look carefully you can see on the right photo there is a moth that I laid there on the tree. I forgot that I did that. On the left below here is the same painting as the one on the right but with an addition of white.

Not sure what this flower is but I picked it this morning while I was walking the dog. I love love love the deep rich color and the star burst in the center. 

On the left side here is just another experiment. Guess I am starting to obsess a bit. This is a paper with a tree drawing and painting and then I have stitched paper to cloth and then I have added some threads going out from it which I will continue to do. On the right is well I'm not sure really because the paper was part of something that I discarded outside a few months ago and I thought I would look at it. It reminded me of the wrapped tree experiment that I am a part of and decided to have a better look at it. All the wonderful crevices of the paper came out when I painted this paper with the walnut ink. I carefully rubbed alot of the ink off. It reminded me of all the printing of collographs that I did several years back. THIS experiment really excites me a LOT lot lot!!!