Hurricane Irene left me with a plethora of fallen black walnuts, which my daughter kindly gathered and put in one of those big Homer buckets from the Home Depot.
These are pretty damn big buckets, folks. The thing was 3/4 of the way full of walnuts with bright green husks. Where to stow them until I was ready to deal with them? Why, the garage, of course, where they were promptly forgotten until this morning.
The top layer of nuts was pretty well dried out, but underneath -- oh, joy! A whole lot of nasty, soggy, dark brown husks just oozing their almost-black juice (and a few maggots, but those will be strained out later).
I have two 12 quart kettles full simmering on the stove now, one of which you can see in the picture.
I figure I'll let the kettles stew for a couple of hours, then set them on the back step to cool. Tomorrow I will strain and filter the liquid, and we shall see what we shall see. Allegedly, I do not need a mordant to dye yarn with this stuff. It will be interesting to see what color I end up with. It will be brown for sure, but -- dark? Light? Somewhere in between?
It will be an adventure, for sure.
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