Change is a process, not an event.
Tag: leaves
Fall oak
We naturally resist moving forward when we don’t feel resolved with where we’ve been.
October garden & walk
I didn’t think I’d be making more monthly garden posts this year, perhaps a winter gallery. But who can resist leaves like these?
Paper prints
Dry flowers apparently aren’t my thing, they look very dull and broken, some leaves might be useful. I don’t know if I went overboard squishing them real hard with clamps on the books?
I do still plan to try some garden printing, when time allows. There must be stuff out there that I can use even late in the season! Maybe I can do it on pieces of cloth that I plan to plant dye, if I use acrylics, they shouldn’t wash off no matter what I put the material through afterwards, at least that’s the deal when I get it on my clothes…. (does anyone paint and manage to look pretty throughout?) I wish I had some more fluid paints than the ones I have, guess I’ll have to invest in Golden acrylics next time.
In the meantime I saw those posts on plant dyeing on paper, which I just had to give a go although late in the season. Next summer and flowers and new dyebed (which hubby at the moment has decided to till for me as a first prep! Yay him!)
First session went quite well although I had no idea how to “steam” the paper, nor how to best keep the sandwiches tight and not floating apart. So I’ll be getting some alder leaves and some coreopsis from the freezer, and hey! How about all those dry homegrown weld and Dyer’s chamomile I collected!? Any Woad leaves left out there I wonder?
Time to get a bit scientific about it. Two pair of sheets soaked in vinegar, two in aluminium acetate. Alder leaves, more yellow birch leaves and Liquidambar styraciflua. Another sandwich, same mordants, strawberry leaves green and yellow, sage, celandine. In between the 2 sets, a layer of frozen coreopsis tinctoria and blue columbine flowers.
Then there’s the consideration of temps. Will a too high temp give dull prints? How low can you go and still get steam? I started with 150 C because 100 didn’t seem to get steamy. 120 doesn’t seem to quite work either, no visible steam anyway.
I’m showing both front and back of some sheets, since they could be used either way.
Unfortunately at some point in the drying process, I lost track of which 4 sheets were aluminium soaked instead of vinegar, AND forgot in which way they were different. I could identify them by which first sheet has the grate imprint from the oven, but after a 3 day break I also forgot which batch was on the bottom. DUH. Scatterbrain.
I’m happy enough with these results that I’m going to keep playing with paper and plants. Test which seasons give the best results and see if I can find any info on it. Some also say use “dead” leaves collected from the ground, some even use older leaves and soak them first. Hmmmm – I wonder about the above pressed flowers and stuff now?!
A short search gave me:
Cassandra Tondro on eco printing with a recipe (backwards) for paper steaming
The natural surface – great forum
Threadborne list of plants to use
Next challenge: If I order a new batch of water colour paper, can I resist getting pens and inks and other lovely supplies while I’m at it?! Now that I’m getting a micro painting studio and all….
On mould and rot
Last year I had a bucket full of beautiful, golden dye, I’m not sure which plant I’d used (thinking celandine), but it was strong and sunny and the cotton pillowcases I dunked in there soon looked very cheerful as well. Then, hungering to see just how much dye they could take, I left the bucket a few more days. When I came back, it had all turned brown and there was mould starting to grow on top, it was slimy and smelly and not sunny at all.
Sometimes you don’t have to leave it out for weeks, just sayin.
So I’ve been thinking, would it be cheating to add a slosh of preservative like what I use for jam? And would it even work in a container that’s not sealed?
So I decided to use a leaf dyeing experiment to try out the concept at least. One with jam preservative, one with vinegar. And well, I’m going to throw in a pot of Celandine too, they need some purging anyway. I can just make it before it gets cold I think.
There are pros an cons of course – since the rot can probably give you both surprises as well as a variety of colour that you wouldn’t normally get. But if that’s not what you want…
With the birch leaves I got exactly the same colour on the yarn, but the bucket without preservative got smelly and mouldy, the other lasted fine for a week in my greenhouse. So, some yellow dyes are ruined, some keep their colour.
Celandine results will be updated later!
I also added preservative to the jars of silk soaking up Dyer’s chamomile dye. No mould or funny smell at all even after weeks. They were in tightly closed mason jars.
So far it looks like the vinegar does as well as the preservative. About a month before both buckets of cloths got a bit mouldy on top, that was after I’d looked several times and taken the cloths out, not putting the lid back on properly.