Sunday, November 11, 2007

New Experiment: Black Walnuts

What humble, even ugly (once fermented a bit) these fruits these are! My favorite tree in front of the Courthouse where I work is a grand,quite old, black walnut tree. The fruits have intrigued me over the years so today I gathered up a very large (Hefty XXL size) bag of the hulls and nuts. Over the weekend I hope to experiment a bit with the dye. I understand that it can yield an amazing range of colorfast browns, golden browns, red browns & even black and gray - depending on the mordants used. A humble fruit with a long history for providing dyestuff. More when I have results ! If anyone has any ideas about using these wonderful hulls let me know! I am planning to try different mordants:ferrous sulfate, alum and, of course,plain.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

oooh I look forward to reading about these dye experiments!

Terri Stegmiller said...

I am looking forward also to your results.....I have many of these trees on my property. They are such beautiful, magestic trees.

Karoda said...

Yes, please share your results and processes...my brother moved into a house where there are 4 or 5 old huge walnut trees in the yard and I was thinking of scooping them up for the sole purpose of dyeing.

Sarah Nopp said...

If you are near a lake and there are black walnuts, you can make instant friends with ducks. You just have to step on the shells and let the ducks know. They will follow you are you crack the shells. I had a pair following me for a half hours slow walk one autumn.

Exuberantcolor/Wanda S Hanson said...

If you picked them up in my back yard you would have 6 squirrels scolding you! Do you have squirrels on the island?

FARBTUPFER said...

I am looking forward to your results!

FARBTUPFER said...

I am lookuing forward to the results!

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