Friday, November 20, 2020

Jewels in the veggie box

 My Misfits Market box, (for more information on what was in it this week, go here) arrived today, and it took a long time to prep them, because I had to keep stopping to admire and take pictures of the total beauty of things like this




A red cabbage, sliced across the equator


A wedge of cabbage when I was cutting out the core.  This is a bit geological, like some semi precious stone or rock formation.


Red onions, posing like dancers, look at that design, if that doesn't trigger ideas to the artists reading here, I'll be amazed



And here's a vertical section of a red onion.  In the background you see all the skins and debris from prepping the cabbage and onions?  That's now bagged and in the freezer, because it's great dye material for the next time I plan on dyeing fabric or yarn.  Or anything else, for that matter.  Never throw away veggie trimmings before you've investigated all the uses they can be put to, is my motto.

I finally tore myself away from admiring and taking pix and tweeting about it, and got them prepped and frozen. Finally.  But new ideas are happening about drawing and dyeing and all the things that jewels of nature like this tend to trigger.  You can also ink up and print with a cross section of cabbage, making a wonderful image that looks very much like a rose, a cabbage rose, unsurprisingly, whoever named the rose knew her gardening stuff.

7 comments:

  1. Red cabbage! I shred it for coleslaw. One small cabbage takes me nearly 3 days to finish off.
    Inking a cabbage for a print sounds interesting.

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  2. Cabbage is great for dyeing. You can change the color by adding different household materials. Baking soda is alkali and will bring up a yellow. Vinegar is acid and will make more purple or reddish dye. Iron will darken it a lot.

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  3. I love the double, triple, maybe it's quadruple or more duty you get out of a simple veggie.

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    1. The joke among artists is that tge still life was popular among painters who couldn't afford a human model. It served as the model then as dinner!

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  4. Only an artist can see the beauty in cabbages and onions or appreciate the value of what everyone else would cast away. I've never gotten into dyeing (beyond a couple of forays into playing about with rust) but if I ever did I'd want to try this. Alas no freezer space to be had here - Resident Chef would disown me!

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    1. Full disclosure: this is why I bought a chest freezer. It wasn't about food, though the top layer is food, but about storage for dyestuffs and raw materials for paper and dyeing. Fortunately I only had my exchequer to consult.

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    2. We couldn't squeeze another freezer in this apartment even if we tried and even if we could I expect Resident Chef would take it over in short order.

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