experiments: front yard finds

I  love natural fibers.  I find them fascinating and wondrous.  A shiny pebble in my world of mysteries!  

Yesterday as we were getting ready to go out, I stood in the front yard waiting... and thinking.  I was curious if the African Iris (Dietes iridioides) leaves would make good cordage.  

The plant from the Iridaceae (Iris family) and is also called fortnight lily, and morea iris.  It's native range is from Kenya to the southern tip of Africa along the eastern coast.  In efforts to figure out if it would make decent cordage I clipped some brown/dead leaves and placed them in a bucket of water for about 2 hours.  I was hoping the results would be similar to the daylily cordage I had made previously with Erin.  No such luck.  After much effort and several attempts, I was unable to make the cordage using the methods I know.  But I will not be defeated that easily.  I'm going to take some back to Gainesville with me for Erin.  Perhaps she'll succeed where I fell short.  She's also much more knowledgeable than I am on this sort of thing, not to mention she's much more creative than I.

Today wasn't completely wasted however.  I started on a project I've been plotting for some time.  Today I began making my army of dish towels.  Hooray for sustainable alternatives to wasteful paper towels!