I feel the Winter every day now as I wake up to a world made crystalline by glittering frost. The cold time of year is precious to me. It’s the time to insulate, draw inward around the hearth, and hibernate with ideas for the coming warm season. As we say goodbye to Autumn, I wanted to do a last natural dye post. One of my favorite techniques for using plant dyes is eco-printing or bundle dyeing. In this technique, the plant material is used whole to leave a ‘print’ on the

Autumn begins early here in the Pacific Northwest, slowly creeping into August with cooler evenings and falling leaves. Already, the clouds have returned, bringing small rain falls and relieving us from the haze of wild fires that burn to the north and east of the mountains. Walking by the wetlands last week, I noticed many Alder leaves on the ground. Click here for my blog post about finding and gathering alder cones. After asking permission to gather, I collected quite a

As an artist that works in the Nature Realms it feels especially important to make oblations to the spirits that surround me every day. Making offerings to the spirits of spring is one of the ways I like to show my gratitude to the abundance the land affords us here in the Pacific Northwest. Our tradition is to wrap eggs in plants that I've gathered over the year and hard boil them to impart the dyes on the shells and then take them out to the forest to hide as food offerings

Alder species are widely distributed throughout North America and Europe. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have an abundance of Red Alder. Alder is a deciduous tree. It drops it's leaves while still green in the fall but it's small female cones and male catkins hang like lanterns on the tree throughout the winter and late into spring. They are easy to find scattered by the wind all over the ground and I've often still found the cones into summer. Alders are noted for adding n