Turmeric Prayer Flags | HerbMother

Happy Sunny Summer Solstice!!!! Celebrating the sun today with a root of its likeness: turmeric.

I?ve been wanting to write this tutorial forEVER. I made these prayer flags?.last summer I think. ?But I just never had the time to do it. You see, I couldn?t for the life of me do the craft and take awesome pictures, and edit them into a gorgeous artful tutorial. I almost hesitated to even share it this week. But it speaks to the real story of the herbmama. My days are busy and filled with everyday life stuff too. And it would be unrealistic to represent myself in this space as a perfect artful herbcrafting mum all the time. So I?m sharing the post anyway, without perfect how-to pictures and a crappy set of instructions. Because it?s a fabulous Summer Solstice craft and it really is rather simple. Besides recipes are made to be broken anyway. I broke several when I made this craft myself. The art of herbcraft lies in the experiment. Make it your own.

I could go on and on about the health benefits of tumeric. If you?ve been reading herbmother long, you?ll have heard me claim my love for this bright little root?once or twice.??But today is about something different. Herbs, plants, nature bits?.they provide us so much more than clinical medicine. A friend said to me recently, ?I believe in food as medicine and medicine as anything that ?feeds? us, literally, symbolically, metaphorically.? When we make a connection to nature in this way, through play, it feeds us as more than healing an ailment. It heals a broken lineage of working with nature. We don?t need to buy fancy dyes in little tubes. We really can make our own with plants. When we play with our kids and make art with herbs, they remember, we remember. They remember that the same vibrant gold that colored their rice, colored the t-shirt they wear to bed every night. We are imprinting our senses with age-old traditions and making relationships. Reconnecting the lines of lost heritage.

So to celebrate solstice today, venture ?into the ?ethnic? foods aisle and grab some turmeric. Make some face paint, dye your hands, color some tee-shirts and paint them, or enjoy some steamy yellow rice with a bit of ginger. Experiment, grab a root and channel the sun, get yellow, and play.

Dying with Turmeric:
Fill a 4 quart sauce pan with water
Add 1cup dried and powdered turmeric
Warm until dissolved
Add scraps of fabric, tee-shirts, etc you wish to dye
Simmer until desired color achieved
To check color simply remove from turmeric bath and rinse under cold water resubmerge if darker color is desired
Bath can be used many, many times with success
Note: you will stain your hands and anything in sight, but it will wash out within a few days.

In honor of ?herb?n play and herbal craft making today?s giveaway will be:

one yard of muslin fabric and one cup of dried?turmeric so you can make your own herbcraft prayer flags.

To enter, leave a comment below. One additional entry will be given each if you?ve signed up for my?newsletter, liked HM onfacebook, and shared this giveaway on one of your favorite eShare tools (like facebook or twitter etc) for a total possible entry count of 4 per person. Be sure to let me know how you?ve linked up and shared in the comments. All giveaways during the grand opening week will close at 5pm Friday the 22nd. Winners will be drawn over the weekend and announced on Monday the 25th. Thanks for playing!

Love and Besos,
Latisha

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