a galling experience...


...collecting oak galls, (sorry bad joke).  A lovely walk this afternoon brought up treasure so hard to find at first and then just before home we struck gold...  A wonderful oak tree with many galls.  Now imagine small children trying to get conkers out of the horse chestnut tree and that was us jumping up and down with sticks beneath our oak.  We managed a healthy 68 galls to make a tannin liquor with plenty left over still on the tree!

p.s. this is to make a dye bath additive, not a drinking liquor !!!!

3 comments:

Clare Wassermann said...

oh I have never heard of the liquor - excuse my density but what is it like/for?

Helen said...

ah, it's my way of describing the tea like brew made from the dye stuff before it's added to the water to make up the mordant bath..., it can be stored for later use at this "tea" stage as well as in the dry form. I'm thinking liquor was the best way to describe it as I found it's not the entire mordant bath and felt it needed an extra word to note the difference. Maybe I should have called it an extraction? I wonder if liquor suggests an alcohol base? What do you think?

Shirley Goodwin said...

I was just about to ask what you did with the galls - look forward to seeing the results.