Helloooo January! Our year started out with the sad news that one of our favorite rabbits had passed away. You can read about the life of our very special bunny, Bramble, in this post here. Thankfully, the rest of the month was not so unhappy as those first days. With the mild weather this winter, there are mushrooms everywhere and ferns and mosses, rosehips and other winter delights make the forest a wonderland of things to discover.

We had only one afternoon of light snow this month - our only snow all winter! The animals seemed confused and there was hardly enough snow to make a couple of snowballs but it was a beautiful while it lasted. Honestly, this is just about the right amount of snow for me!

We added our own color to the winter woods with a day of indigo dyeing in the beautiful, but cold, January sun. I am hoping to host some small workshops and single-family programs very soon because I really miss sharing this fun process with others!

(The felt in the front of the drying rack was first dyed with other colors to get green and purple when combined with indigo. They will be soon be incorporated into some brand new products for the shop!)

As you can see in the “before, during, and after” dye photos below, when indigo is in the right state for dyeing fiber, it is actually green colored! Only when removing the fabric from the green liquid does it turn blue. It’s like watching a science experiment happen every time.

We have really been enjoying spotting all the mushrooms in the forest this winter! These little mushrooms are growing out a mossy log that had fallen over a small ravine.

The red fungus below is called “scarlet elf cup” and these days they are the brightest color in the forest. They are small and grow on twigs and little sticks on the ground, so they’re sometimes hard to notice, even with their bright color.

The orange fungus was such a fun, squishy thing to find. It’s called witches’ butter and it’s not very common here in our woods. It feels like rubber. So weird!

We also found a lot of cat’s tongue fungus in January! These funny little jelly fungi have a textured underside that looks a lot like the rough underside of a cat’s tongue. You can see that in the first photo. The fun thing about these is that they can be made into candy! A little simple syrup and dehydrating slightly, then dipping in sugar, turns them into sweet little treats with the texture of gummy bears. You can read about how we made these in more detail on this Instagram post.

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After the busy holiday ended, I had some time to put into developing a new kit. These patchwork hearts are hand stitched using naturally dyed fabrics and I’ve put together instructions and kits to sew your own! You can choose between pink and blue themed fabric packs and you can even choose to have organic lavender included to turn them into sachets.

This type of stitching is called boro stitching and is a style of stitching that was traditionally used in Japan to patch fabric. The best thing about it is that is uses simple stitches and there’s no wrong way to do it! No matter how it’s stitched together, the end result is beautiful.

harvesting seeds Japanese indigo persicaria tinctoria

harvesting seeds from Japanese indigo plants

One way I’ve been getting ready for spring is by harvesting seeds from last season’s Japanese indigo plants. They didn’t set as many seeds as expected and some experts are hypothesizing that the smoke from the wildfires in September disrupted pollinator activity and many plants weren’t pollinated as usual.

The process of separating these small, shiny seeds from the dry flowers was a little tedious but very satisfying to end up with a handful of tiny seeds created by my own plants. It is plenty of seeds to sprout lots of new plants this year. I can’t wait to grow them!

The dye-related projects weren’t all indigo this month. I dyed up lots of pretty pink fabric using cochineal dye to test out my brand new natural dye kit. In the absence of teaching classes, offering these kits is the next best thing! I hope to create more as the seasons change and more local dye plants start growing.

January wasn’t without its storms. The temperature may have been mild but we’ve had a lot of wind and rain and many trees have fallen in the forest. This little tree fell right into the middle of a large sword fern. It flattened the poor fern plant but they are tough plants and this one will surely bounce back.

We had some big animal changes this month! We realized that as lovely as Spruce, our ram, was, we just didn’t have the capacity to keep him. With having a ram, we needed to keep our sheep in two separate groups, and that proved logistically difficult on our small property. We were sad to see him go but since he’s pretty much a perfect ram - great wool, nice horns, good conformation, perfect non-aggressive personality - he found a new home very quickly and we have photos of him looking pretty happy on his new farm on the coat in Washington.

We also re-homed our chickens. It was not an easy decision but we need to rebuild the chicken coop and create a permanent home on the property to keep chickens. We can’t do that while we also have them here so they went to live on a friend’s farm. We have visited them and they have lots of new chickens to get to know and they are very well cared for. We miss Tiny, Flopsy, Shellback, Storm, Mama, and all the others but we’ll get chickens again in the future.

Despite our dusting of snow, we could feel a hint of spring at the end of the month. Lillies are starting push up from the ground and the leaf buds of the bigleaf maple are starting to swell. Indeed, the end of January marks the halfway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. Our sheep are enjoying the grass that’s still growing. Just look at their happy mouthfuls of grass in the photo below!