Turkey Red Journal
About "Tinctoria"
Lys Guillorn
"Tinctoria" is my love song to dye and the hidden potential of plants and fungi.
I had studied natural dyes twenty-five years ago, as a teenager with a high school textiles instructor who taught me how to spin yarn on a drop spindle. Then in 2017, I finally bought a wheel and looked for resources on fiber arts at my local library. That led me to books on natural dyes and sparked off months of obsessive reading, from books and the internet (including the Turkey Red Journal).
A few dyes interested me more than others, in particular magenta dye from certain types of lichen, blue from Persicaria tinctoria, as well as the rainbow of colors available from mushrooms.
Because I am both a singer-songwriter and a visual artist, I wrote a song about my year of dyes and photographed some of my materials and experiments. The result is the song "Tinctoria"–which I performed and recorded with my band–and an accompanying book that contains the lyrics, an essay on dyeing, and some of my photographs. The cover text was drawn using concentrated purple dye from the lichen Punctelia rudecta.
| Cover of the book accompaning the song "Tinctoria" | ||
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| Photograph Copyright by Lys Guillorn | ||
You can find the lyrics to "Tinctoria" at https://lysguillorn.bandcamp.com/track/tinctoria.
Lys Guillorn's web site is www.lysguillorn.com and she can be reached at lys@littlecowgirl.com.