Gathering, Processing, & Dyeing Woodwardia

The three tribes on the Klamath River use woodwardia fern to create the reddish colored overlay in their baskets.  The cap I made last year (and pictured in my last post) contains quite a bit of woodwardia.

With most of our weaving materials, there are two steps: gathering and processing.  Woodwardia has an additional step of dyeing.  After processing, the strands are a cream color.  In order to get the reddish color, the strands must be dyed with bark from an alder tree.  So, we've created three separate videos to show each of the steps.

 

This video shows the Gathering Process and takes about 7 minutes.

  

 

 This video is about Processing the woodwardia and takes just under 5 minutes.

Dyeing woodwardia with alder bark

This video is about 6 1/2 minutes.

Here's what it looked like with it was dyed and dried.