We had an irresistible couple of warm days so I had a chance to dye some papers in the bucket of black walnuts and water that I cooked and steeped back in November. The mix smelled absolutely wonderful for the first month or so but has gotten gradually funkier - up until the grand finale this weekend. I had added a pharmacy sized container of alcohol so it did not go mouldy but did nothing for the smell. I think that the worst materials that I have ever worked with were yucca spears. I had cooked the fibers in soda ash during a heat wave and got sidetracked by life. Three days later I uncovered the pot - it smelled like birthday cake with something dead in it. I had to have two fans blowing on me to keep me from gagging when I formed the sheets. Nice looking paper though!

The black walnut dyeing was an experiment to see what worked and what didn’t with my handmade papers. The cotton watercolor paper was a bit of a disappointment but the fiber papers (particularly the Iris and Equisetum) were spectacular. The paper sucked up the dye and made a very dark even sheet with shimmery bits from the plant fibers standing out.

The gathering of the walnuts is one of my favorite parts of this process. This year we went to Lu’s farm and she graciously gave us two full buckets of the walnuts she had already gathered. In previous years we gathered our own from a friends land in Oak Ridge - made some pretty good calligraphy ink from those.

Black Walnut