A Hundred Quarter Tones of Yellow

The little I learned about 'kusaki-zome ' (dyeing with dyes extracted from native plants) in Japan, where it is a centuries' old cultural art, I’ve been attempting to apply here. A plant dyestuff will produce radically different colors depending upon what type of fiber is used, and the variation can be striking: a specific variety of eucalyptus that on wool, dyes out as a deep, brick orange, dyes as a tepid gray or washed-out yellow on silk. And while the Australian literature--given that this is a wool producing country--only talks about dyeing on wool, it is dyeing on silk that attracts me. The best result I've had so far has been with Tasmanian native cherry, a feathery-looking cypress that grows all over the State. Its hue as a dyestuff depends upon the season in which the foliage is picked, and at least, in early spring, it produces an intense bronze/yellow-green. I’ve been amazed at how many distinct yellows all the various kinds of eucalptus here produce, and it would appear that God's favorite palette in Tasmania, at least on silk, is yellow. Fukumi Shimura, a textile artist in Japan, said something to the effect that each color has a world that belongs to it alone, and each signature batch of yellow indeed starts to feel like a different personality.