Brambles

I've long been an advocate of 'food for free'. Wild blackberries are plentiful around Loughton, and one of the great pleasures of a mild, sunny autumn day is to go blackberry-picking. But, legend has it, not after September 29, Michaelmas Day. The story goes that on that day the Archangel Michael, the greatest of all angels, defeated the angel Lucifer in battle and threw him down from Heaven into Hell, where he became the Devil. Lucifer landed on a thorny blackberry bush, which made him so furious that he spit (or in another version of the tale, he urinated) on the unfortunate bush and cursed its fruit. A more rational explanation of this snippet of folklore would be that the fruit taste less sweet when they are over-ripe and beginning to spoil from uncertain weather and early frosts. 

Yesterday, to make a change from brown dyes, I retrieved some of last autumn's blackberries from the freezer and brewed them up in my dye pot. The raw dye stock looked rather unpromising and the alum pre-mordanted wools rather like spaghetti, but I had a lovely surprise when I drew off some of the dye stock into small pan after half an hour's simmering, and added a pinch of tin. The mixture flashed dark purple, which transformed the skein of wool that I added to the pan. Adding a pinch of iron to a second pan yielded a dull brown. The alum and copper skein turned to a soft pinkish shades when washed and dried. From the left, the photo shows alum, copper, tin and iron mordanted wool. I remain pleased with my 'four skein method' as the results never fail to surprise me.