Last weekend my surface design group went on an art retreat. We stayed at the Kiwanis Lodge in Marion, Montana which is right on a lake. The weather had been rainy and cold and I thought it would continue into the weekend. But a small miracle occurred and we had beautiful weather all weekend. We did eco printing most of the weekend but a couple of us did some gelatin plate printing as well.

Here’s a few of us getting ready to start on Friday afternoon. We had all collected a lot of leaves so we had two full tables covered with leaves.

Here’s just a small selection of what we used. Some worked great and others not as much. But almost everything we tried printed on paper.

Louise got some leaves from a local florist and they gave us little cards with different sayings on them. This was mine.

We soaked our papers in alum water and then applied the leaves that had been dipped in iron water. Some of used plastic in between to resist the leaves printing where we didn’t want them. Then we put ceramic tiles on both sides of the paper leaf sandwiches and tied them up.

We had several steaming stations and pretty much kept them going all weekend. There was also an onion skin bath that some of the items were boiled in.

After steaming for an hour, the fun part of opening the packages began.

We got some beautiful results. The bright blue is from blue carrots.

Some of us also did eco printing on fabric and larger paper. I didn’t manage to get any photos of the fabric that was printed. But I will try to get some photos at our next meeting to show you.

We also played with gelatin plate printing again which was fun and colorful.

And I’ll leave you with this photo I took of the gorgeous sunset. It was a gorgeous weekend and we had a great time. It’s always so nice to allow yourself dedicated time to “play” with like-minded friends.