eva schaefer wrote:
Just had to come out of lurkdom for a moment - saffron
is not cheap in Spain. I spent some days eight years
ago with a family who picked the flowers, separated
the stamens and did the roasting. They then sold it
to the dealer for 1 kilo at 100.000 pesetas - about
600 Euros. The price varies from year to year
according to the crop.
They used - then, at least - what was left of the
flowers to make the dye for the prickings, only to
show me how, because yellow cardboard is now used in
La Mancha.
This reminds me of catnip. I'd been cultivating around
every little sprout of wild catnip that came up in the
garden, and had so much that when I dried it for winter use
I took only the terminal buds and threw the rest on the
floor for the cats to play with. Or on the windowsill for a
bed: http://home.comcast.net/~debeeson/Photos/Freda.jpg
So when I read in a dyeing book that one could get a clear
yellow from catnip stems, I experimented and found that the
leaves yielded more color than the stems did. It became
obvious to me that the writer had been dying with the refuse
of a catnip-packing operation.
And so pricking card dyed in Spain with saffron that wasn't
worth shipping elsewhere rang a bell with me -- as did the
comment on one of the fiber lists that one can get a good
dye out of olive fruits -- a jaw-dropper here in Indiana
where olives come in very small jars, but somewhat less
surprising if one has access to the refuse of an olive grove.
My jaw dropped again when someone on Fibernet asked where
she could buy walnut hulls. Buy? People buy walnut hulls?
You just walk down the road and try to pick them up at
just the right stage of getting run over.
The leaves, though available all summer long, would be
rather expensive what with having to rent a high-lifter to
pick them -- not to mention that though people will pay you
to haul off their fallen walnuts, you'd have to get
permission to prune the tree.
And black walnuts as trash would seem odd to people who buy
them in small bags of tiny pieces -- but most of the money
you pay goes to the guy who got them out of the shell. I
think that whacking them with a hammer is still the only way.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
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