Meeting 3 : Testing the (Dye Pot) Waters

“Invasive plants — earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

This month, we furthered our banana fiber explorations and discussed the abundance of banana trees in our region. Monika brought a meat tenderizer and dog brush she picked up for her kudzu and wisteria processing .These DIY tools worked really well, and were a step up from Julia’s DIY butter knife technique for processing the fibers. We also created an impromptu plyed sample.

From LB’s forage, to separating out the fiber, to spinning it up – we created basho yarn all within a few hours :

I pre-mordanted a small quantity of kudzu bast fiber using alum as the binding agent. Then together, we worked with osage orange saw dust (an abundant tree in the area) and powdered madder root from Local Cloth’s stock as well as whole madder root grown in my backyard to naturally dye our kudzu samples. We were happy to see the kudzu fiber took the dyes so brilliantly and kept its luster. We only had time to simmer the fiber with the dyestuff for 45 minutes instead of the usual 1-2 hours.

See you in the weeds,

x Nica