Book of Kells Project: Back up Blue

I did it on a whim and I didn't regret it:  a lake of deep blue columbine.

It wasn't something planned.  I stumbled across a great mass of flowers in a public area near a local park and thought, "why not?"

I actually grow this flower.  It's a rich royal blue, almost purple, columbine.  My plant, and it's daughter plants, was a volunteer at another local park that kept getting mowed down until I rescued it in the dead of night.  It's not a native plant so I was helping, right?

 Anyway, after getting lake pigment extracting down to a competent level, I was on the look out for newer materials.  I started looking at flowers thinking, "What color could you produce?"  

Now my columbines don't produce masses of flowers.  Just enough to be a splash of color in the shade garden.  But there were so many of this stand, I could easily pluck a handful for a test lake batch without striping them.  As a general rule, unless it'd a dead common plant, like dandelion, never take more than you need, and always leave some to carry on.

Now most of the plants I experimented with, when laked, produce a color that shifts a little or significantly from the original.  Blue iris goes green. Red Rhododendron goes purple.  Even madder shifts to a different red.  A mullein lake came out sunny yellow, but yellow dye plants are generally strait forward that way.  Blue dye plants have no such reputation.  Woad and indigo are dark green and both require extensive processing to extract the blue bits.

Not so with this columbine.  When dried, it made a nice medium blue.  

 

This isn't to say one could dye with it.  Only it made a beautiful blue pigment that probably is not lightfast.  But if I need a natural bluey blue I know I have it.  I even made a second lake which produced a pale blue, perfect for sky.