Tag: Ecoprint

Impromptu Dyeing

First batch of ecoprinted scarves this year, fresh leaves – fresh results.

I had a week of holiday recently and one day decided to go out for a short walk. Maybe to drop of plastic trash, maybe to post a letter, I can’t really remember. While out, I noticed all the green around, leaves are really returning to the trees and plants. So while walking along, I picked some leaves here and there. I came home with a hand full of greenery and a desire to do some ecoprinting. So I got all of my stuff from the dyeing cupboard, mixed up some additional iron water and got to work. The layout is fairly random with one scarf being less densely printed than the other. All leaves were placed with the top side up, which obviously gives a different effect on the mirrored bottom-up side.

Ecoprinting is still super interesting to me. I should probably take more extensive notes on what I’m doing because I can’t really predict what the outcome will be, but that has its charms too. You can see that most of the well printing leaves on the right scarf are at the top and then one in the middle. The left one is more uniform in what printed dark and what printed light. I like these results. Unfortunately, the source of my previous batches of silk no longer lists it on its website, so I’m going to have a more expensive time getting hold of something to print new projects on. Que sera sera.

Silk-dyeing Again

Getting some more scarves finished, I now have fifteen of the things.

I really, really enjoy eco printing silk scarves. Not sure why it’s so nice, I normally don’t gravitate towards projects with an element of surprise and these have been full of surprises. I never know how it’s going to turn out. So far I’ve dyed up around 8 meters of silk. I found a webshop that sold 3 meter lengths of ‘silk crepe for dyeing’ and I got 6 meters of it. I then cut that into 1.8 meter lengths and 35 cm widths to get 12 scarves out of 6 meters. Had some leftovers for some more experimentation and decided that I didn’t yet have enough of the silk dying experience, so I ordered 6 more meters and have since made four more scarves.

The first batch you’ve already seen, but I’ve now actually hemmed them with a ‘rolled hem’ on the serger. From that batch, I learned that the bramble and what I think is a maple worked really well. The second batch had less stellar results. Most came out so light that you could barely see them, this included some weeds from outside my house (my plant determination app thinks its Vinca major?), leaves from the tree outside my house – invisible and therefore destined to be overdyed, one unknown tree and something that I just completely forgot.

  • Roof Terrace Fruit
    Strawberry, apple, pear, red currant & white currant
  • Quercus robur – Common oak
  • Unclear and since gifted

The third batch, however, had some really good ones. chestnut leaves from the tree at work, hazelnut leaves from my hometown, something from the road to work with thorns and a collage of fruit plants from my roof terrace. The only one that was slightly disappointing was the fruit collage as only the strawberry gave a very clear print and the rest was quite blobby.

  • Unclear
  • Corylus avellana – Common Hazelnut
  • Ginkgo biloba

Then there was some more experimenting but that didn’t turn out so well, so I only finished the one where I put flowers on (Common ragworth). This resulted in a bit of a polka dot effect, but much darker than I expected. Not sure it’s as lovely as I’d imagined, but at least I now know what it would do if you put this type of flower in an iron bath.

  • Rubus caesius – Dewberry / bramble
  • Vinca major variegata – Greater periwinkle
  • Acer campestre (?) – Field maple

So at some point last week, I decided that it would be a lovely idea to actually know which plants all my scarves came from. So I set out to collect leaves from all the places that I’d harvested them from initially to determine the species and dry them. This also meant that I couldn’t help myself and I got more leaves. I opted for a few that worked the best (more chestnut!) and some that I found along the way.

  • Aesculus hippocastanum – Horse chestnut
  • Horse chestnut + Field maple + Common oak
  • Jacobaea vulgaris – Common ragworth

I collected some chestnut leaves because they make the best print. Then while cycling around, I found some really cool looking leaves with five leaflets that turned out to be Virginia creeper close to the original Ginkgo. While passing another big tree next to my former home, the leaves from a Red maple were collected. The Black poplar was the last I took with me. This one has an alternating pattern of back/front of the leaves and you can sort of see that. This one is also a prime example of how folds leave blank spaces in the print.

  • Parthenocissus – Virginia creeper
  • Populus nigra – Black poplar
  • Acer rubrum – Red maple

Conclusion is that I’ve really enjoyed this dying process and with winter starting, I don’t have many more opportunities. The only problem with this hobby is that it produces way more items than I actually personally need. There’s only so much gifting I can do to get rid of them. Sometimes I wish that my hobbies didn’t amount to so much stuff… Ah well, at least these take up way less space than plushies.

Adventures in Eco Printing

At the end of the instruction video for Adventures in Dyeing, the instructor showed some examples of eco printing. A method of using natural materials, like leaves, to make impressions and dye fabric. After getting a few more newsletters and watching another livestream with her showing some eco printing results, I decided to splurge and purchase the course. It came with a number of instruction videos, a booklet of leaves that do well and a starter kit with two silk scarves, two pieces of cotton fabric, 100 grams of iron sulfate and 100 grams of alum.

  • Tester strip
  • Oak Scarf
  • Unknown Leaf
  • Ginkgo Scarf
  • Bramble Scarf

The process involves soaking your fabric in something (water, water with alum or water with iron sulfate), then placing leaves (in some cases you dip these in water with iron sulfate first) on your damp fabric, rolling the fabric tightly and then steaming the whole thing for a few hours. I’d recently purchased a sample of silk chiffon and I decided to use that for my first try. I went out into the wild, picked a number of leaves – my botanical knowledge is next to 0 so I have mostly no idea what anything is – and placed them on my fabric. Because of the nature of the fabric, which was very crinkly, I didn’t roll it very tightly and it shows in the result. Most of the prints are quite faint.

  • Very faint impressions
  • I think the Ginkgo is here somewhere?
  • You can see the mirror of the big leaf in the middle
  • The one side of brambles is very red
  • The other side shows some more detail

Scarves

After this first try, I decided to try to print some scarves that each only had one type of leaf. The first one used something that I assume is an oak(?). The most fascinating about this one is that you can see a clear difference between the back and the front of leaves. They leave very different impressions. I put the one column face up and the other column face down on purpose, and then folded the fabric over the top and rolled it up in a plastic sheet. It was steamed for about 2-3 hours. The pre-dip was just water.

  • Such differences between front and back
  • The other folded over side

The second scarf has some other leaf, which printed very nicely. You can see the darker edges around all the leaves, which I like a lot. These leaves were all put down with the same side up and there are some small differences between front and back but they are less pronounced. Im not sure why the one side has so many more dark spots, but I do like this effect.

  • Some really nice edges

For the third one, I used Ginkgo leaves. In the test version these came out very faint, so I decided to try something new and pre-soak the fabric in iron water too. This made the scarf much more yellow in base colour. I also dipped the leaves in iron water before placing them on the fabric. I seem to recall that Ginkgo was quite nice to use because the leaves are quite flat, which is helpful if you’re trying to roll the fabric onto a stick. However, the results are still a little faint. I do like this one though.

  • Ginkgo leaves leave spots on the one side and just edges on the other

The last scarf was dyed with wild brambles. These came out quite red in the test version, so I steamed it a little shorter to hopefully keep some of the details. For this version I chose to randomly put leaves face up or face down, and I think the effect was very nice. You can again see clear differences between the front and back of the leaves. I’m pleased with the results.

  • Fascinating differences between front and back
  • White versus Red

Here you can see four of the scarves together. They still need to be finished along the edges and I hope to teach myself how to roll hem at some point in the future to be able to have some true completed scarves. I don’t think I’m done with this process though. I still need to watch a few of the videos and try to use some of that alum that I currently possess and have done nothing with so far. I do find it fascinating that a similar process begets such different results.

  • Very different results while the two on the left and the one on the right have identical methods

On to the next adventure!