Natural forest Products
for you and your home
Botanical Ink Dyestuff Fabric Art Supplies Woodcraft Card and Gift Culinary Crochet Forest Foliage Plants and Seeds
NEW ITEMS!
Small-batch, cold-processed Goat Milk Soap is now available!
It’s hard for a lot of people to imagine getting clean with a black chunk of soap and gray foamy suds squishing between your fingers but give this bar a chance. The combination of charcoal and bentonite clay allow for a deep cleaning without the stripping of your natural oils. This is formulated as a facial bar, but it makes a marvelous hand soap too.
All Game Trail Ridge soaps use only natural colorants and feature high-butterfat milk from our Nigerian Dwarf Goats.
Each fully cured, hand-cut bar is 4.5-5.5 oz.
Charcoal and Clay Soap contains: saponified olive and coconut oil, milk from pastured Nigerian Dwarf Goats, bentonite clay, activated charcoal
Grow your own fantastic yellow dye!
These stately plants may grow over your head and reach out with dozens of big, flowery arms. Not only will you be growing a traditional dye, known and used since at least antiquity, but you’ll have beauty while you’re waiting. The plants can get a little noisy when pollinators, particularly honeybees, start foraging.
The seeds can be picky about germination, preferring freshy disturbed soils in very early spring or later in the fall. They readily self-sow if some branches are left beyond flowering, and volunteers will tolerate transplant if you must move them.
The entire plant (flowers, leaves, and stems) contains yellow dye.
Weld, Reseda luteola, is also called Dyer's Weed or Dyer's Rocket
If you have questions, send them my way: whitney@westwoodcolor.com
This generous plant rewards the world with delicious food, nourishing tea, and beautiful natural color.
Wild Black Raspberry, or ‘Blackcaps’ provide abundant, flavorful fruit that is top notch for gourmet jellies and pastry fillings.
Save your jelly pulp to make an intense purple or magenta ink perfect for painting, drawing, or staining wood.
The leaves make superb herbal teas and tinctures. To make Westwood Color’s house tea: 1 part nettle leaf, 1 part raspberry leaf, and few choice blossoms such as red clover or chamomile. Simple and satisfying, hot or cold.
GROWING TIPS: Blackcaps grow easily in full sun and need minimal water once established. The vines prefer to shoot into the sky for 6 or seven feet and then arch over, sometimes to the ground. They produce well this way, but shorter bushes are easily maintained by trimming the new canes toward the end of the growing season-this is a great time to collect your tea leaves. Cut out 2nd year canes once they have finished fruiting. A single cane will eventually fill out 4’ x 4’ space and you’ll likely have plenty of volunteers to expand your patch, share with a friend, or gather for the tea pot.
We offer our Pacific Northwest Native Black Raspberry, rubus leucodermis. You’ll receive a well-rooted 2nd year cane, freshly retrieved from our gardens. MORE IMAGES COMING SOON!
Questions? Ask them! whitney@westwoodcolor.com
