Dipsomania

Jim Lemay loves his chainsaw.
He got a new one this fall and it is a crackerjack.
He and my sister Mel live in the foothills of the Siskyous down by Ashland, and there are many trees on their little hillside rancho.
Ex-logger + giant new Stihl chanisaw + trees = noise of small engine and crashing and now and then a real  substantial THUD.
I've got all this canvas and hemp both of which are notorious rot magnets, and in the old days some sailors tanned their sails.

St Johns Nova Scotia a fish store painted with the old codfish ocher paint, several years after the last coat was applied.

In Nova Scotia, home of the Grand Banks Dory fleet, they would mix up a gallon of cod liver oil and about five pounds of powdered Red Ocher clay and some pine tar and lay their sails oot on the gravel and paint a generous coat of this shit  throughout, and go fishing the next day. Not me. Too stinky and sticky. But a beautiful color, kind of a lively bright raw red.

Not the effect I am looking for. Lively nonetheless. Ocher is basically hematite in clay, much to the delight of East Africa.

Me and Jim set out to harvet some Black Oak bark chips, which took about seven minutes with that giant saw. Jim merely touched the spinning chain to the inch thick bark of an oak stump and the sawdust flew in a  flurry snowdrift onto a sheet of cardboard we had laid out to receive. The chips were a kind of a creamy white in color.
However by the time I got two gallon sized ziplocs of them home, the chips were a delicious shade of scarlet.

And so was the water that I soaked a cupful in just to see what was going to happen to my test-patch of canvas.

 
Not much, but it did start the deal, and a couple days later I did a second soak, just like you do with a deerhide in the tanning process. With the cloth you rinse, dry, repeat, until you get the shade you want.
I know from my previous exeriments that tannin residue in the cotton canvas cloth inhibits rot to a surprising degree. And the second soak was a bit darker in result than the first, so I do think I have the process I will eventually use.

Much better color after the second dip.Although the fungicide properties of the tannin are infused in this test patch, the color isn't there yet. I have a secret strategy for getting the color to the traditional shade of red that involves logwood chips, a traditional red dyestuff.