Pickled onions and natural dye, North star (?), Green guerilla
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Pickled onions and natural dye
Last week I talked about not wanting to waste anything in the kitchen. I didn't like the idea of discarding any sourdough starter before feeding it again. My kitchen scraps go to feeding the wonderful wrigglies in my worm farm. Unfortunately, worms don't like excessive citrus or onion skin.
So what do I do with all that onion skin from making a batch of Pickled Onions? I use them as a natural dye for fabric.
In this week's video, I share how to peel 3kg of pickling onions with not a tear shed, and then how to use the onion skin as natural dye.
Natural dye is not usually as fast as chemical dyes. There are things (mordants) you can add to fix the colour more to the fabric. But I'm just a hobbyist and I'm not too concerned about colour-fastness. I just enjoy using materials to their fullest potential.
North star (?)
Last week I also briefly talked about wanting to explore my north star. I was talking to my friend Christin Chong and she recommended talking to another friend, Chris Wong (I promise you I am not making these names up). Chris is good at asking you the questions to explore what is important to you and taking notes on a Miro Board.
While talking to Chris, we found out that the North star is actually not visible from the Southern hemisphere. I guess that's why down here we make a reference to the Southern Cross instead. Some Māori tribes call this Te Punga, or the anchor of the great sky canoe. I like this reference to an anchor. It feels appropriate to call life values as an anchor to life decisions.
Here's a snapshot of what it looks now:
I am going to ponder on this further.
Green guerilla
The Dominion Post (the Wellington newspaper) published an obituary of my late ex-husband last weekend. It was well timed as it was published on Jaime's birthday. She saved a clipping of in her memory box.
The print version was titled Green guerilla and festival organiser. He made the news a few times when he established a community worm farm in an abandoned bus stop. The city council claimed this as illegal and shut it down, regardless of the fact that it served a community purpose, was out of the way, and was environmentally friendly.
Undeterred, Martin moved a few meters up the road into the bush and built a community compost centre. He cleared out the blackberry bushes, built steps and platforms, wooden bins for composting, and wooden planters for planting vegetables. City council once again threatened to close it down, but finally decided to leave it. Martin worked every weekend on the site, turning the compost, and planting vegetables on the road side using the compost from the bins.
Martin was always environmentally conscious. Years ago, he demanded food stallholders at his events to only use eco-friendly packaging and cutlery. I was there when he shut down an Indian food stall because they were still serving their mango lassi in plastic cups. The stallholder was furious and threatened to never come to any of Martin's events ever again. Martin didn't care.
Ten years later, the City Council were advertising their events as eco-friendly and zero-waste. Martin was ahead of the times.
I hope we will see more community composting centres. I also hope the local community would continue to maintain the work Martin has done with the compost centre. I know there were a few of his neighbours who cried outrage at the community compost, demanding "the blackberry bush to be returned" (this is direct quoted from the local neighbourhood newsletter from back then). Some people would do anything to shut down a good idea. Maybe because it wasn't theirs or maybe because they didn't like the person whose idea it was in the first place.