Meeting 5 : Harvesting Vine + Rinsing Root

“Give the one’s you love wings to fly, roots to come back, and reasons to stay.”

— Dalai Lama

Since our last meeting we have been harvesting kudzu and knotweed roots from our site in Marshall, NC, where earthwork and road building efforts have lifted the topsoil and exposed countless japanese knotweed and kudzu roots that have been cohabitating on the mountain. LB brought knotweed roots for us to wash. We will use these freshly harvested roots for dye experiments and to create tinctures using vegetable glycerin as the extraction aide.

We discussed steps needed to scale kudzu fiber processing. This is an important step o document, before sending fiber out for industrial processing at a central North Carolina hemp mill. We also discussed warp options for WNC kudzu cloth. Traditional kuzu-fu in japan used kudzu fiber for the weft with silk or cotton warp. We think hemp would be a good use case to show the possibilities of an industrially spun and sturdy enough kudzu yarn that could be both weft and warp in the future. We also want to explore wool warp and kudzu weft cloth, a reverse of the traditional Linsey-woolsey, linen warp and wool weft blend.

We also walked across the road to the kudzu patch neighboring Local Cloth. The runner vines, which grow straight, and are best for vine harvest had been cut along the road, but we found a few ideal for fiber processing near the parking lot. We stripped off the leaves and I brought them with her to Rainbow Community School the next day for kudzu leaf paper making, inspired by Nancy Basket’s work with kudzu leaf papermaking.

See you in the weeds,

x Nica