My garden is one of my favourite places, where I get inspiration and energy to prepare for each years knitting season. I love to grow a huge variety of edibles, and cram 'just one more thing' in every last nook and cranny. I also plant pollinator friendly ornamentals, and take immense pleasure in noting each new species that visits.
Here's a little timelapse of how it's grown so far this year:
I always find it hard to believe, most of it started off the season as a patch of bare earth!
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I was so lucky to be able to go to my friend's beautiful family cabin on Georgian Bay a couple of weeks ago, and while I was there I got the chance to do a little lichen collecting for a natural dyeing experiment. From what I can tell with my limited lichen identification skills, I gathered some each of Sunburst Lichen (Xanthoria elegans; the orange one), Hammered Shield Lichen (Parmelia sulcata; flat blue-green), and Reindeer Lichen (Cladonia rangiferina). I'm trying both the ammonia method (a 3 month long steep in ammonia and water, shaking the jar daily) and the boiling water method (it's as simple as it sounds) to extract the colour. The boiling water method is much quicker, but...
It's been quite a while since I regularly shared the behind the scenes world of Westlake on a blog, but I'm back and taking another crack at it!
Feel free to peruse entries on my old blog here. Or see my instagram feed for a more up top date view.
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