A Try at Eco Leaf Printing

I have had one previous try at eco printing which didn’t turn out very well. But after Terriea’s recent post, I thought I would give it another go. You can see the process I followed on this post on my personal blog. I did some prints on paper as well, which you can see here. We used a variety of leaves. We did not have the correct kind of eucalyptus so the kind we used is the dried kind that must be artificially dyed. Where you see the bright blue green color on the fabric, it is from that kind of eucalyptus.

Here are the bundles that I rolled up with the leaves and cooked in the dye pot. I did one piece of silk, two felted scarves and one scarf that is a wool and silk blend. I also dyed several pieces of cotton too.

These are the scarves after I opened them up and pulled off the leaves. So I did get some color but the leaf prints were still very vague. I was disappointed that you couldn’t see a leaf impression. The paper did much better than the fabric.

Here is a print that almost looks like a leaf. This is silk habotai.

The gallery above shows different portions of the silk. The silk seemed to work best with the leaf prints and took in the most color. I am planning on using this piece of silk for a nuno scarf.

These are photos of the cotton pieces. I didn’t do any leaf prints with these, just threw them into the different dye baths. I have to say that Zed made a comment a while back about some of the natural dye processes just leaving the fabric looking dirty and I agree that some of these fabrics look like dirty dish rags. But perhaps I will find that they will be the perfect background for a project.

And these last photos are of the wool items. The wool did get some color but again, I wasn’t really happy with the “prints”. My plan now is to add free motion machine stitching to the felted scarves in patterns of leaves with fall colored thread. Hopefully, that will make them a bit more attractive. 🙂