Stitching Tea and Roots

 

Stitched roots on tea-dyed paper

The title of these two pieces says it all: "The feeling I think you're supposed to get when drinking tea...but I don't." 

For some reason, for decades people seem to assume that I love tea. As a result, whenever a gift-giving occasion comes along I usually end up with at least one gift pack of specialty teas and have even scored a teapot or two along the way. The tea always goes into a large brown shopping bag labeled "tea" that is stored in the dark recesses of my walk-in art closet. I have herbal teas, smoky English teas, gift packs of tea from Taiwan, and curative teas.  In one of those 2 a.m. idle moments the thought occurred that it might be interesting to see if they could be used as dyes. 

Experimenting with tea dyeing

After kicking off a round of experimental dyeing using strips of paper towels and an endless variety of teas, I turned to the other key ingredient in this project: bamboo and wild grass roots. (See Roots Project for earlier experiments with roots.)

Bamboo and native grass roots

A first step was separating and organizing the roots in preparation for stitching.

Organized roots!

Close-up of roots

Thence ensued a blissful interlude of stitching. The results are below and perfectly capture the original theme — that elusive, zen-like feeling I uneasily suspect you are supposed to experience while drinking tea.

Panel One (11" x 11")

Panel One detail

Panel One detail

Panel Two (11" x 11")

Panel Two detail

Panel Two detail

As a beverage, the point of tea continues to elude me. As a dye, however, it holds enough possibilities that my battered old bag of teas will remain in the art closet. And in future, when gifted with yet another gift pack of teas, my enthusiasm may be marginally less false.

Fiddling with Scraps: The Roots Book

 

Accordion book, 3 3/4" x 4"

Fashioned from an assortment of scraps from the Roots Project and two years of pandemic eco-dyeing, this little Roots book combines sashiko stitching, eco-dyed scraps from foliage within a one-mile radius, and the roots of native grasses. Enjoy - I know I did.

Back of book

Inside

Outside

Close-up

Close-up

Close-up

Close-up

Close-up

The creative surprise? How easy it turned out to be to appliqué the dried native grass roots to the cloth using teensy tiny anchoring stitches.

Weave Yourself a Metaphor

 

Weave Yourself a Metaphor

This assemblage combines scraps and elements from a range of different projects: native grass roots and the chiffon ribbon and broken jewelry bits the roots were supposed to miraculously and organically turn into jewelry (but didn't); knitted strips of eco-dyed cloth; and strips of paper dyed with coffee containing notes from the spiritual window shopping I have been doing over the last several months.

Elements

Broken Bird

A gift from a friend who knows my inner nature.

Broken porcelain chick

Roots, Ribbons and Jewelry Bits

Technically, this is part of the ongoing Roots project. Here we see the native grass roots, chiffon ribbon, and broken jewelry bits in situ. The idea was that this stage of the project would give the roots agency and they would assume control of the jewelry-making process. That didn't happen — the roots did not bond and intertwine with the ribbon as envisioned. So...they have been recycled into this assemblage.

Native grass roots trying to fashion jewelry

Eco-Dyed Recycled Cloth

Scraps from an eco-dyeing session, cut into long strips, knotted together, and then knitted.

Cutting cloth into long strips

Knitting cloth strips

Paper Scraps with Notes

The notes contain ideas that captured my attention in recent months, like: "An ideology is one's imaginary relationship to reality." To encourage the notepaper to blend better with the rest of the elements, I dunked the notes in a cup of coffee and then let them dry. No photo - use your imagination.

The Assemblage

When this piece began, I was focusing on the poor little chick's plight and was using the working title, "Broken." As the work evolved, it transformed into "Weave Yourself a Metaphor," which, as far as I can see, is what we are all doing every morning when we wake up.

Roots Project: Passive Jewelry Piece #2

 

Courier necklace made with Reed Manna roots

For background on the greater, ongoing project, which involves various art experiments with native grass roots, see Roots Project. I have come to think of this second passive jewelry piece as an ephemeral courier necklace - an artifact from a nonexistent culture. I envision lithe, delicately limbed messengers wearing these fragile neckpieces running hither and yon, delivering the messages written within the rolled up paper beads.

The native grass root used here is Reed Mann, the roots carefully teased apart into long separate strands. The beads are made from Chinese good fortune paper.

Artifact from an unknown civilization

One more passive jewelry piece will be posted shortly. Then, with any luck, the active jewelry collaborations in which the roots have control and creative agency will enter their harvest phase.

At this point in the project, I realized I was on the right track when I woke up one morning with the urgent thought: I need to grow a pair of earrings!

Roots Project: Passive Jewelry Piece #1

Bamboo root, Reed Manna root, bone

This Passive Jewelry series is the second stage in a series of experiments involving native grass roots (see The Roots Project). I have used the term "passive" to distinguish this series from a collaborative series currently in progress. In this passive series the roots are simply serving as materials; they play no active role in working collaboratively to create the jewelry.

This first piece was one of those happy accidents, introducing Lucky Bamboo (dracaena) root to the mix. I realized one of my Lucky Bamboo stalks had become root-bound in its container of water. I experimented, cut the lower portion of the stalk with the roots off entirely, and put the old stalk back in a fresh container of water (where it is surviving happily and madly sending off fresh roots). So - it turns out you can sustainably harvest Lucky Bamboo roots!

Lucky Bamboo (left), and Reed Manna 

The first step involved carefully teasing apart the Reed Manna clump into separate strands.

Reed Manna root

The Lucky Bamboo root had grown into a swirling circle in the confines of its water container, and this shape triggered the inspiration for the rest of the piece.

Lucky Bamboo root

Below, you can see the longest, strongest  Reed Manna roots teased out into workable strands. The ball, which was formed from shorter, weaker roots, was set aside for a later piece of jewelry. 

Necklace materials

It was possible to thread long strands of Reed Manna root onto an embroidery needle and stitch/loop it through the bamboo from either side, and then string on little tiny beads made out of bone, picked up long ago, somewhere or other.

Close-up: Roots and bone

And that brings us to the end of our narrative on this first root jewelry piece. Stay tuned.

The first root necklace

Roots Project: The Way of Good Advice

 

This is the third in the initial series of experiments working with native grass roots, and the last work that incorporates the original planter, with the dried grass above and the roots below.

I had been mulling over the frustration of elders who, having suffered a long haul of human existence and gathered what seem convincingly like core, universal truths and strategies for living, find that there is an insurmountable communication barrier — the young appear to be utterly indifferent to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In this way are we any different from the octopuses, orphaned at birth, who have to learn everything from scratch and then proceed to take all of the knowledge their brilliant little brains have accumulated with them when they die?

I used Chinese good fortune paper, normally burned as an offering for dead ancestors, to write down a few key things I have learned over the last 72 years, rolled them into beads, and used them in this piece.

Step one: transcribing wisdom

Step two: transforming wisdom into beads

The assemblage utilizes a rather gorgeous clump of Reed Manna grass, the roots removed from the hydroponic bath and gently, gently teased apart with a toothpick. Finally, the roots were carefully threaded through the beads of wisdom.

The final piece

Close-up

And there the advice remains, available, unseen, beneath the surface. It occurs to me at this stage that perhaps, while the advice is never directly imparted or communicated, the fact that it was accumulated somehow magically translates into the structure and growth of the plant. It's a hope anyway, and a very vague, dimly understood metaphor.

For more about this continuing experimental work with roots, see The Roots Project.

 

The Roots Project: The Beginning

 

Indian grass (left) and Reed Manna

The Roots Project began during the Covid-19 pandemic, has continued for the past six or seven months, and is ongoing, with new experiments growing as I type. The project began when I lifted some wheat grass up out of the hydroponic system I was growing it in and noticed how wonderfully fascinating the roots were. I "harvested" the wheat grass a little later, lifting the roots entirely out of the water, and hung the whole thing to dry. Then I found a little spaceman in one of my bins of rubble, and the result was the first piece in the Roots Project.

Roots bottle series #1

Roots bottle series #1

Roots bottle series #1

I decided to take a deep dive into working with roots and seeing what was possible. The first step was to order three different types of native grass seeds: Indian Grass, Reed Manna, and Winter Wheat. The hydroponic system I have been using for years, fashioned from recycled plastic soda bottles, was already ideally suited for root growth and harvesting.

Hydroponics using recycled soda bottles

Grass varieties used

Within a month I had a little prairie growing in my front windows overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland.

The prairie

This long, slow art project was ideally suited for floating through pandemic isolation with a measure of calm. I had only to wander up to the living room and watch the grass grow and see how the roots were developing to feel I was accomplishing something.

Below is the first of the harvest and the second in the Roots bottle series.

Roots bottle series #2

Close-up

Another close-up

This piece is made from Indian Grass, which has a lovely red tinge to its roots. Tucked inside the roots is a small, corked vial with a message inside. And yes, I wrote the message, but because of pandemic-brain have absolutely no memory or idea at this point of what that message says. Which works perfectly with roots and buried memories, and loss and the passage of time, and the messages that never get delivered — from words of love to sage advice.

Another early experiment was the hanging shown in the first photo in this post and again, below. The hanging itself was too latter-day-hippie and ho-hum for my sensibilities, but it was my first foray into teasing the roots apart and learning how strong they are, and how different the roots from different grasses look. 

Pink-hued Indian Grass (left) and the stronger, white Reed Manna

A series of posts will follow over the next week or two, illustrating how I began to become a little more bold in working with and manipulating the roots, moving on from the bottle series to jewelry fashioned from roots, to a collaborative jewelry project that involves actively working with the roots as they are growing. Stay tuned.