acorns!
Chip n' Dale, ice age gruel, the oldest bible, West Village Pin Oak Ink
Acorns ripe down-pattering/While the autumn breezes sing. —John Keats Fancy
I am a bit embarrassed to say that I have traced my fascination with acorns not to Keats but back to a children’s book that was based on the Disney Short “Chips Ahoy” (1956). Chip and Dale (see above) fight over the last acorn on their tree which flies out of their paws into a lake and floats across the water to reveal a nearby island which is basically just one big oak tree going crazy with acorns. I had forgotten that the main plot is about stealing Donald Duck’s ship in a bottle to make it across the water to this acorn utopia but I remembered the feeling of the blue water and blue sky and orangey brown colours of fall and that the oak tree that was almost bigger than the whole island and maybe most of all I remembered the way that each acorn is this little golden capsule of adventuring. Maybe it’s not surprising that Walt Disney tapped into this dual nature of acorns: the adorable and the epic.
Right now in, almost any city, you can find an acorn rolling across a sidewalk, its jaunty little body containing both past and future. And surely there is something heroic about an acorn, being the seed of the tree that the druids worshipped for surviving in the middle of a field in any storm and containing the knowledge of the gods in the form of lightning. Each acorn is a civilization in miniature containing the oak DNA for viking ships and oak barrels, roman roads and the armature of the great arched churches of the middle ages and even further back to the first food (after an elaborate leaching and pounding process) of the first people to wake up hungry from the last ice age on probably every continent. Oaks (as the ink nerds that corner you at parties will tell you) are also needed to make iron gall ink which ruled as the black ink of record for some 1400 years from the oldest complete Bible right up to its official usage in the US Postal service into the 1950s. The story of oaks and oak galls deserves its own newsletter but it got me wondering about the inky possibilities of acorns. My favourite recipe which you can find in my book Make Ink calls for just the caps of acorns and some foraged rust and it creates a quite complex silvery grey colour. Adventure and transformation, at-your-feet-accessibility and otherworldly inexplicability, future and past all somehow get mixed into this colour. And the results are beatiful.
Things to click:
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I tried an acorn cap ink last spring from caps that had over wintered in the woods near me. It was a beautiful process. I especially like the scent they have when cooking.
Loved experimenting with acorn dye and ink this year. Picked up some dark acorn caps in NB that offered up a rich dark brown ink.