bit more about Alder

There was some practical work I did with Alder as well, Different parts of the tree can be used to extract different coloured dyes.... if you want to dye cloth with it, then you need to look at how to dye cloth, because you need to add something to the dye, and something to the cloth to make it stick, I just wanted to extract the colours to make paints with, so I made watercolour paints from the tree and in the end painted a picture with them.

What I want to share is the processing of fresh bark to create a red paint. You need a piece of alder wood with fresh living bark on it, and to take that respectfully. What I did was to check all the trees until I found one with a damaged branch, and after connecting, I sawed the damaged part to give it a clean cut that would heal better for the tree and be less likely to cause infection. I also gave an offering to the tree.
At home, to process the bark, first lightly shave the outside of the bark to remove a slight layer and with it all the bird shit and lichen etc, and then strip the full layer of bark from the wood, in small strips is ideal if you cant get it off in one go. What you need access to is the inner surface of the bark.
Then, you simply chew it for as long as you can. Your mouth will fill up with saliva, and then spit it out into a bowl. Use this as your paint, or dye substance. It will look like a bowl full of bloody vomit.
If you dont want to paint, this is the side effect I wanted to share really - when I did this I was full of cold, feeling really bad, but wanted to get this paint made so I ended up chewing 3 mouthfuls of the prepared bark. It worked a miracle actually, I felt right as rain very quickly, and my cold was completely gone - until the next day when it had worn off and the cold came back as bad as before.
Alder is a member of the birch family, and the bark is full of aspirin -BEAR THIS IN MIND IF YOU HAVE AN ALLERGY! So I had been dosing myself up with natural aspirin. Probably not a good idea to do this every day, but it worked extremely well for about 18 hours :-)
I eventually made paints with the bark, catkins and cones - leaves were not out to make dye from, but I painted a picture with the paints -

In addition to the painting, I used the piece of wood I had taken as incense, I found that the wood, shaved and burnt on charcoal had a really lovely smell to it, very much like raspberry.