Yellow Flag iris, though a beautiful marsh flower, is actually an escaped garden variety iris, and takes over wild areas not participating in the ecology but monopolizing in the Pacific North West. This makes it a great candidate for some potential exploration. First we worked on weaving simple multi-strand braid style (warp free)weaves, while the iris was fresh, it stayed workable for about a week after harvest, stored outside in a shady place.

the iris shrunk as it dried ( as all plant mater does), so the weave became very open, and lost most of its strength- though I still really like the look of it. I experimented with drying out stocks and then soaking them to rehydrate enough for weaving, but had no real success, stocks had become too brittle and weak for much use. I did experiment with twisting the dried and soaked stems by rolling them on my thigh into a twist, and these became quite interesting for weaving purposes, and had a limited amount of strength with the twist.