My project for a couple days now-I am slow these days-is to clean the utility room-it is a small room but totally packed.
Two large-long Sears commercial deep freezers-which I have now gone through and defrosted. Washer and dryer and a deep utility sink.
My house has no storage space, no closets, no kitchen cupboards, no basement no garage you get the picture. So my boxes of canning jars sit in the small middle space of this room stacked high-until I get the hallway done, tiled and get my commercial style shelving up so I can finally organize my canning jars etc and other food stuffs. That will be very helpful to me.
Anyways-I have a box with two large glass jugs that I put together for iron water and copper water-both for use as a mordant-fixative for natural dyeing on cottons, wool, silks. This is in this room as well.
Learning that the Kitchen Witch makes and uses iron water for her fixative in her eco dyeing I needed to take a look at this. I would have to go back to my old blog at least 10 years-oh my how time flies-to know when I set this up. I did allot of natural dyeing back then along with allot of rust dyeing. I keep a big pile of rusty things under an oak tree nearby.
I should have taken a photo but the iron water was no more-had turned to moldy water and the iron pieces in there were no longer rusty. Hubs said they looked like they had been blued ha ha.
So of course all this was taken outdoors to empty clean and find new rusty objects and make new iron water-which will take up to 6 weeks. Here is a how to link I think instead of alum water I am going to use a spray bottle to spray my hemp papers lightly and then soak the leaves etc in the iron water before setting up the eco printing onto my papers.
My copper mordant was pretty much evaporated and a little moldy too. Lovely blues though on the inside of the glass. I didn't want to mess with this right now so I just filled that one up with vinegar.
The mimosa trees are prettier than they have been in several years. They must really like the hot humid temps we've had,they also went through several hard freezes in April.
My first batch is pretty much dry now. I took the short stems off the main stem and placed into a box to finish drying. I want to gather another batch. I also thought I would dry some of the flowers and see what I can do with them in paper making.
I have lots of pine needles here so I am thinking of experimenting with them in paper making too perhaps the green ones as the dried will not break down but can be added in as textures.
I needed a bit of a break so I decided to share this post about how to make iron water especially. Off to cleaning
