Tag: Plants

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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On to the next adventure!