Ecoprinting with mordants and natural dyes

Feast or famine: I haven’t posted for a while, so today you’re getting a long photo-heavy post! All the garments featured are upcycled, bought from charity shops or auctions.

With most of the previous ecoprinting I’ve done I have not mordanted the fabric. I’ve used mostly silk and wool, which are protein fibres and tend to print OK if I bundle them with a piece of cloth soaked in iron. The vintage cream silk dress below, for example, was not mordanted in advance – I just used maple leaves and an iron “blanket”.

So I extended this method to other silk garments that were already dyed different colours. The scarf below was a strong lime yellow, and I printed it with different geranium (cranesbill) leaves. I picked the leaves from the garden of lovely embroiderer Lucy Goffin, who makes beautiful bespoke structured garments and also runs the fantastic Marchants nursery with her husband Graham.

This is an orange silk skirt printed with maple leaves. The orange was quite dark, so the print is quite subtle.

And this was a pale pink silk blouse printed with larger maple leaves.

Just as experiment, I also printed an unmordanted yellow cotton T-shirt with sycamore leaves. As well as the shape of the leaves, I love the shapes produced by the long stalks – so you will see quite a few sycamores featuring below!

I then mordanted a batch of garments with alum, and dyed them with natural dyes before ecoprinting on top.

This is a cotton apron dyed with oak leaves and printed with sycamore leaves.

This T-shirt was dyed in the oak leaves after the apron, so it was a paler brown, before printing with maple leaves. The maple leaves were quite thick and waxy, so they seem to have acted more like resists than printing themselves. You can also see very clearly the effect of using an iron blanket, as I mistakenly forgot to include it in one part of the bundle! I may have to overprint this with something else.

Finally, it was back to silk. Here’s a silk top dyed with onion skins and printed with sycamore leaves.

Another silk top dyed with pomegranate and printed with sycamore leaves. Both the onion skins and the pomegranate gave very similar golden yellows after dyeing (sorry – forgot to take any photos), but I simmered the pomegranate bundle with the sycamore leaves for less time, so it’s brighter.

The cotton apron picked up more details from the leaves than the cotton T-shirts, and the silk was even better, perhaps due to the relative thickness of the fabric?So many combinations and permutations to try!

 

Eco printing samples part 2

In my previous post on eco printing I wondered whether the faintness of the prints, especially on felt, was due to the fact that the steam couldn’t penetrate the felt very easily when it was rolled up.

So I performed a similar experiment but this time I immersed the bundles in hot water and onion skins and simmered them for an hour. Then I left them to cool overnight and opened them up the next day.

The results were definitely better, particularly on felt.

Interestingly, the eucalyptus on felt (above) printed orange, no matter what the mordant, while the rose leaf and petal dipped in iron mordant (below) came out best.

The iron mordant also worked best for sycamore leaves on felt (below).

Oak leaves on cotton mordanted with aluminium acetate (below) gave a  lovely clear print, regardless of which mordant was used on the leaves (or even when none was used at all).

Sycamore and rose leaves also printed quite well on cotton, but those dipped in the iron mordant were clearest.

On silk, iron-mordanted sycamore and oak leaves did best, while eucalyptus and rose leaves were pretty similar for all mordants.

Conclusion? It looks as if full immersion rather than steaming is the best way to go, unless I can get a large pressure cooker or find some other way of forcing steam through the fabric more efficiently.

Shibori rust dyeing pt 2

To give you a break from yet another eco printing experiment, I thought I’d share another shibori rust-dyed scarf with you.

This scarf is made of a double layer of heavier silk (it’s actually a man’s evening scarf), so I thought it would be more robust than the very lightweight silk ponge scarf that I used last time.

I bound it with rusty screws, slightly more loosely than last time. Because the silk was thicker and double layered, the rust colour didn’t spread as far or as fast as last time. By the time I had finished binding the screws on the silk ponge, the scarf was already a rusty colour all over, whereas with this scarf there were only faint traces of colour.

I was also concerned that although there would be good colour on the side of the silk that touched the screws, the other side of the scarf would be too pale.

So after binding it I put the scarf into the pot containing the onion skins left over from dyeing the eggs, heated it up and left it for a few hours. Then I removed it and left it to cool overnight.

When I untied the scarf the next day, it looked very dark at first.

But as it dried it became paler, and there was an obvious difference between the two sides of the scarf.

After drying, ironing, soaking in bicarbonate of soda, rinsing, drying, and ironing again, this was the final result.

You can that the presence of the iron screws darkened the colour quite significantly – it’s much less golden than the eggs were.

And the kumo shibori pattern on the side of the scarf that was in contact with the screws is paler with darker rust marks compared with the other side.

Which side do you prefer? I’m not sure. But I have a reversible rust-dyed scarf with no holes, so that’s a result. 😉

Eco printing on eggs

A quick Friday afternoon project, following the instructions in India Flint’s book Eco Colour. She says it’s a Latvian tradition, but my friend Magdalen says they do it in Ireland as well.

I pressed some small leaves against the shell, then wrapped the egg in onion skins and put it in an old popsock. Put the eggs in a pan with water and more onion skins, and boil for 10 minutes. Let it cool, then unwrap the eggs – voilà!

Tuna niçoise for supper tonight. 😉

Update on ecoprinted/rust dyed scarf

After yesterday’s post about my ecoprinted and rust dyed scarf, I had a couple of queries/comments about washing and colour fastness.

I ironed the scarf when it was dry to help set the colour, and noticed that the areas that showed as bright pink in the photos yesterday were much less bright. I was intending to leave the scarf for a couple of days before washing it, but then I read on this blog by Kimberley Packwood Baxter that I needed to neutralise the rust by soaking the scarf in water with bicarbonate of soda.

So I did that this morning – the soaking removed the crusty bits of rust that were attached to the scarf, but I didn’t lose much colour. Then I rinsed it, washed it with a bit of shampoo and rinsed again – still very little colour loss.

Interestingly, now that it’s dry and ironed again, I can see the bits that were previously pink have changed to an olive green – would be interesting to find out why this is. Is it due to oxidation, or to the change in pH?

Also, the outlines of some of the onion skins can be seen very clearly.

I’m hugely excited by this technique – though it could be beginner’s luck (well, second-timer’s luck). I think the rusty pipe is acting as a mordant as well as providing the rust colour.

Already the next scarf is wrapped up and rusting gently on the windowsill – and I’ve acquired two more rusty bits of metal from building sites I was walking past. 🙂

More success with eco printing

You may remember that my last experiment with eco printing was not a huge success. Since then I’ve acquired a copy of India Flint’s book Eco Colour, so I thought I’d have another go.

I found a beautiful rusted pipe on the street – perfect for bundling up a scarf. So I soaked a silk scarf in vinegar, dipped yellow and red onion skins and eucalyptus leaves into vinegar and laid them on top. Then I rolled the whole lot around the pipe, tied it with string and left it in a plastic bag on the windowsill outside for 10 days.

I was intending to leave it for a month, but suffered from the usual problem – impatientitis. 🙂 There seemed to be a lot of dark colour developing, so this morning I could wait no longer and unwrapped it.

Here is the whole scarf, with the pipe to one side. You can clearly see the rust patterns at the ends (these were on the inside, closest to the pipe). The pink bits were actually from the yellow onion skins rather than the red ones, which went black. The orange shapes that are not rust were the eucalyptus leaves.

Here are some close up shots.

The scarf is now drying in the airing cupboard – I’ll leave it for a few days before washing it and keep my fingers crossed that I don’t lose too much colour!

Coffee and onion skins

I love indigo (in case you hadn’t noticed!) ;-). But recently I’ve been reading a lot about other natural dyes, including eco printing. So I thought I’d have a go.

My first attempt at eco printing was not a roaring success, based as it was on pulling together various techniques I’d gleaned from scouring the internet. (Since then, a more detailed tutorial has been published by Terriea Kwong at The Felting and Fibre Studio.)

I soaked a silk scarf in vinegar, put some rose and geranium leaves on top, rolled it up and tied it, steamed it for an hour, then left it in a glass jar in the sun for three days. The result was some very faint leaf prints, though a few were a bit stronger.

Then I came across Dyes from Kitchen Produce by Setsuko Ishii in a discount bookshop, illustrated with line drawings in that beautifully simple Japanese style.

So I went back to trying shibori techniques with a couple of different dyes.


First coffee:

Then onion skins:

I think there are some promising colours here. ESP fears I will be raiding the freezer for his stores of soft fruit next!