Dying quills

[isaac]

Found some bloodroot the other day and decided to experiment with quill dying with natural dyes again...

frenchinwisconsin.yolasite.com/my-blog/quill-dying-fun

[Chuck Burrows]

Howdy Ike - I love this kind of stuff. I've done a fair amount of natural dying using local products from around here (SW Colorado).

Red - red ocher - it does work but needs to steep for quite a while

Black - charcoal

Yellow - a local plant called rabbit brush - the flowers (if you'd like to try this I can send you some dried)

Sunflower seeds - blue/green (dont' have anynow but later in the year)

Blue mud - blue - a friend gave me some but won't reveal his local source

I mixed the yellow and black and got a nice brown and with a bit of red a rusty/black

I got a sort of dark salmon by mixing colors, but for the life of me can't remember what I mixed together to get it! Also I found that re-dying RIT berry quills in natural stuff it muted the colors quite a bit.

here's a couple of sheaths I used natural dyed quills on -





One note too be careful of boiling the quills themselves - I had it happen and they got a bit brittle after drying, but a boit of bear oil rubbed on them helped a bunch.

[Chuck Burrows]

A little story -

Back in either 72 or 74 I was visiting a friend on the Pine Ridge rez and asked about doing quillwork. He took me over and introduced me to the "old" ladies doing some quilling (multi-talented folks - a quill on one side of their mouth, a smoke on the other, and jabbering away in Lakota while their fingers are moving a mile a minute).
Anyway they started giggling and talking amongst themselves in Lakota when my buddy mentioned I wanted to learn. The ladies started giggling and eying me up and down and about the only word I "got" was berdache.......
A little later that day a couple of college students showed up and were absolutely thrilled (all gaga about being in the presence of REAL natives) by being there and were asking questions about quilling and especially their dyes. The ladies answered that oh yes they used all kinds of things for dyes, especially berrys. By the looks and actions of the ladies I knew something was going on but since I didn't speak Lakota........
After a couple of hours the students left and everybody cracked up practically laughing their guts out. after recovering, my buddy Pete spoke to the ladies and one of them went in the back room and came out with several boxes of RIT - she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said in English, "RIT berrys! much easier to gather............"

[isaac]

Definitely women's work... but so is stitching birch bark, tanning, and a lot of things I do.

I know that Densmore even mentions that men are not even supposed to look at the dye pot. Oh well!

As to your dying... how did you use the sunflower seeds. I am curious to that as they are correct to this area and I grow a couple varieties of historic sunflowers.

Thanks,

Isaac

[Rod]

A number of years ago, I was out in the pasture checking cows. I noticed some powdered-up scoria at the base of one of the hills---usually this stuff is pretty pinkish, but this was a much deeper red color. Anyway, the gears started turning, and I made up a slurry of scoria powder and saliva, and proceeded to paint stripes down my the leg of my jeans just to see how it worked--then I cut open a prickley pear cactus, and smeared the juice on and 'fixed' the stripes. Took quite a few washings in the machine to get those stripes out, it was a surprisingly durable dye/paint job.

Rod

[Chuck Burrows]

re: Sun flower seeds - some folks just boil them whole, but I found crushing them first works best for me. The ones I use are the local indegineous types and the seeds (IF I can beat the birds too them and if there is enough rain to get them to grow in the first place) are farily small caompared to commercial ones but I still dry and crush.

re: Ocher - I've also used yellow (we have a fair amount of volcanic areas around here) and it can be turned red by heating.

[isaac]

Did a bit more dying...
frenchinwisconsin.yolasite.com/my-blog/dying-to-have-fun-