Working with Pine Needles

Pine needles are readily available and a renewable resource. However, not all pine needles are created equal. In New Zealand there are lots of pinus radiata trees but these needles are quite short for creating art woven projects. I am fortunate that the park next to my house has a Ponderosa pine and these needles are excellent as they are quite long and strong.

Pine needles gathered off the ground need to be washed and dried to make sure no bugs or spores are attached to them. This is a simple as washing in warm soapy water and patting dry with a towel and leaving to air dry thoroughly.

To control the bundle of pine needles and facilitate adding in of more pine needles, the needles are threaded through a plastic straw and then attached with strong thread. I have used a polyester waxed thread. The ultimate in waxed linen thread but this can be expensive and difficult to source.

In the project above I have used gel medium to attach tissue to a firm substrate and achieve a textured background. Once dry, I have placed some blobs of acrylic paint in random places on the substrate and used an old credit card to blend and spread the paint.

This was an introductory example of using pine needles so the composition of the pine needles is just three simple korus at varying heights. We will look more closely at more comples projects over the next couple of days