Vegetable Dye Natural Color

Vegetable Dye Color on Wool
crochet joined squares, 1975
sold to Antiques Buyer at St. James Court Art Fair

In the early 1970s when I began off-loom weaving, self-taught using a crudely built rigid heddle (since my undergraduate school, ironically in the textile-rich hills of eastern Kentucky, (MSU) had no textile program) and my love for fibers and textiles had been nourished by my Swedish Grandmother (origin of magnuson in blog & DBA). Madelyn Magnuson entrusted me with several family made quilts, doilies, and my grandfather's cotton twill sailor suit worn in his child portrait around the age of five. "You will take care of these things your grandfather just wants to get rid of", she would tell me whenever giving me another heirloom. Using poor judgement in selecting an heirloom as a wedding gift, one Magnuson family quilt, would be lost through "heavy use" and baby-burping precious moments during the baby making phase in the '90s. Along with that loss, through my own ignorance, of the red and green textile would go a family baptismal gown, tossed away like a tea-stained dishrag, which had endured over one-hundred years of use, worn by my mother and uncle, my first mentor in photography. Some people want a brand new SEAR'S baptismal gown over 'tradition' when it comes to a photo-op. This would confirm one of the many things I would learn from a textile expert, Alma Lesch, Kentucky's pioneer in modern textile collage.

I would be introduced to Alma Lesch during the early '70s after publication of her 1971 Vegetable Dye recipe book (which many Kentucky fiber artists used as a resource, some called it the "bible" for Natural Dyeing) when Mrs. Lesch visited the local high school's art program, where I was one of three visual art teachers. Mrs. Lesch agreed to be guest speaker for the Art Club. Batik was a popular textile process at the time. By sharing my self-taught attempts with Alma Lesch in weaving, carding raw fleece (wool in the grease) and using the drop spindle to make thread, became a common ground after my first meeting with the innovator who created her signature form, the Fabric Collage Portrait. Alma Lesch, became my fiber mentor, eventually warning me, after becoming good friends and realizing we had a common denominator when it came to extended family, that ignorant people do not appreciate textiles on a level we take for granted being fiber artists. "They wouldn't know a K-MART quilt from a hand-made quilt", she remarked after declaring one of my great-grandmother's quilts as museum quality. Knowing how many people had commissioned fabric collages in which some family clothing was used, I asked Alma to consider a commission after showing her my grandfather's childhood sailor suit. "Why don't you make a portrait?" was her advice. Years later, while working on a series of knitted socks turning a pair into a trio of similar if not unmatching color patterns she remarked, after telling her I was giving a set to my growing family of neices and nephews, "You don't give them these socks do you?" I had learned to turn heels in the early '90s and shared this technique with her in our late night working sessions, often on weekends. I knew these socks would end up in a washing machine and felted to beyond use in the heat of a dryer...

Vegetable dyestuffs grow abundantly in any Kentucky summer. From walnuts to coreopsis, Queen Anne's lace to sumac many years of harvesting and preparation of the dyepot would yield pound after pound of durable color joyfully created in the practice eventually leading to my graduate study in 1980 during Mrs. Lesch's last year of teaching at U of L. My screened fabrics became non-functional forms based on Japanese Joinery forms used in carpentry and wooden contruction, far from the initial exploration of vegetable dyes and natural yarns.