I'm pretty stoked to share these. Last month I brought home a pyrography machine, and I've been quite infatuated. These four are burned on sassafras wood and finished with polyurethane.
A recent poll about root beer reminded me that most other countries don’t have sassafras trees, the main flavoring agent in most root beers (some use sarsaparilla, which is more common outside the US, but I honestly don’t know how those compare to sassafras).
It also makes me wonder how many places have birch beer, a soda flavored from birch bark, which in my opinion tastes minty and sweet, almost like wintergreen soda.
But mainly it reminded me of this video by Alexis Nikole on TikTok:
"Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits"
- Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo
Darkness Manifesting by The Phantom Painte
Turning a bright red for autumn the remarkable aromatic foliage of Sassafras albidum (ague tree, silky sassifras, mitten tree) which develops in three different shapes, all of which can be on the same branch; three-lobed leaves, unlobed leaves and two-lobed leaves. The common name mitten tree makes a great reference to one of the leaf forms. This is an upright tree spreading by suckers.
Since a lot of people like that root beer post, here's some sassafrass leaves:
[ID: A photo of a white hand holding three green sassafras leaves. The leaf closest to the wrist has three rounded lobes, the one in the middle has a main part, and one lobe sticking off to the side like a mitten, and the last leaf is round with no lobes. End ID.]
On the tree itself:
[ID: A branch on a sassafras tree, covered in leaves in the shapes above, green and drooping towards the camera. End ID.]
And the bark:
[ID: A photo of a white hand, with the thumbnail painted blue, held up to the side of a sassafras tree trunk to show its size. The trunk is about as wide as the palm of the hand, and covered in light grey bark with an overlapping pattern of rounded, long flakes. End ID.]
BTW these images are public domain because I hate capitalism :)