While it has been good to see the colour changes that can happen when applying heat to the iron based ochres, this controlled fashion has limits for me. Without pushing things I can get the pigment samples up to about 1100 °C (roughly 2000 °F) and this gets me well into the brown range of … Read more
Today my eldest son and I went to the Guelph quarry to go rock hounding. We had a beautiful sunny day and the perfect cool weather to enjoy ourselves. We found many different crystals (a few which can be used for pigments) and came back after a full day with three big bags full of … Read more
With the pigment from the Conestogo river collected and purified I began to test the effects of heating in earnest. Increasing the temperature by 100ºF each time, I tested the samples from 300ºF (150ºC) up to 1700ºF (925ºC). This was a whole day’s work, as the kiln needed constant attention and the samples were being … Read more
Now that the fall weather is here in force, the horse chestnut tree behind our house is loosing its leaves and its nuts. I’ve used the hulls for the nuts before to make ink (something that Fr. Nathanael showed me many years ago). So today the kids and I gathered up what we could and … Read more
Winter seems to be coming quickly this year, and while it was cold this morning (11 °C / 52 °F) the week’s forecast called for even colder weather as the week progresses, so I decided to collected pigment from the Conestoga River today. Because of the rain we’ve had, the river is pretty muddy, but … Read more
Over the last few years I’ve collected a nice pile of rocks from the Conestoga River that have a wonderful sienna colour to them. That said, it seems like the rocks have absorbed the colour from something outside themselves (oftentimes the centre is still colourless). Today I took two of my children for a walk … Read more
Over the past week I’ve been carefully cleaning the indigo pigment I harvested from my woad plants this year. This was possible because the morning after I was so disheartened to be left only with green form I opened my vat to discover a rich blue foam has developed overnight. I still don’t know why … Read more
Over this part summer my wife and I left a couple of plots “unplanted” in our garden. Instead we shook out last years woad seeds over the earth and let the plots be. As I had hoped, the woad plants grew up among the weeds. But last night it went down to 6 °C (43 … Read more
I grew up in a sandy area, north of Barrie, where pine trees were abundant, but where my family and I live now is a very different region. Pine trees don’t naturally grow here in Conestogo where it is so wet and the soil has so much clay. But, just north of Elmira there is … Read more
So, what did we find in Cobalt? Here’s a list of the minerals for those interested: Safflorite (cobalt): Collecting cobalt in Cobalt has a nice symmetry in my mind. Almost every mine site we visited offered a rock or two of this mineral. All told, I brought home over 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of it! … Read more