Eco printing with leaves

 This workshop involved getting to grips with a technical process that produced remarkable results.

It was led by Caroline Nixon, who was an excellent teacher giving very clear instructions. Even so, the process requires a lot of equipment, careful preparation, uses expensive fabric and provides variable results. I have never done eco printing before so I think I got good results as a beginner. The above piece was my very first go where I was just testing out which leaves printed well.

The basic process of eco printing is to use a combination of natural fabric soaked in mordant, leaves high in tannins, pressure and heat from steam to print without any other dyes. I completed this workshop in February but collected many of the leaves back in November, preserving them either by drying in a flower press or freezing in sandwich bags.

The leaves I found to be successful were oak, alder, cercis, liquidamber, maple/acer, chestnut, cotinus, eucalyptus, rose, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, ornamental blackcurrant, perennial geranium, and ferns. Other members of Textileartist.org Stitch Club also had success with sage, alder catkins and bladderwrack seaweed.

The fabrics I used were all pure silk - most pieces are Silk Noil, which is a slightly slubby absorbent silk that I had never used before but I also tried silk dupion, habotai and organza - you can get a handy silk sample pack from www.thesilkroute.co.uk. You can also use wool, linen or viscose. I didn't have any of these fabrics just waiting to be used in my stash so I bought just half a metre of silk noil and the silk sample pack to try out this process.

First you have to prepare your fabric by scouring it to remove any dressings in the fabric from manufacture or any previous washing powder residues. With silk this just involved putting it in the washing machine with non-bio delicates washing liquid on the silk/wool setting. You need to use damp fabric for the eco printing process so I kept my scoured pieces in a zip-lock freezer bag once out of the machine. For the other fabrics you also have to scour them with soda ash either in the machine or boiled up on the stove.

There is an extensive equipment list for eco printing, which was quite off-putting to gather together:

• Large wide pan with lid - needs to be no longer used for food preparation 
• Something to act as a steamer rack in the pan - I used chicken wire but rocks, and silver foil were also suggested
• Round poles to fit in the pan  eg metal pipe or wooden pole
• Plastic sheet to protect working surface
• Clingfilm or foil
• Binding strips eg string, bandage, T-shirt yarn or pantyhose
• Washing up bowls
• Old towel
• Plastic gloves
• Scissors
• Tongs
• Measuring spoon

First I had to make up the mordant. This is the chemical that helps bind the plant pigment to the fibres in the fabric to make the printing permanent. We were shown how to use iron. You can buy ferrous sulphate powder easily online or you can chuck some iron nail or bolts into a jam jar of water with a splash of vinegar and make your own rusty water. I decided to buy the powder as it would be one variable that I could control more easily. You need to make up 0.25ml (1/4 teaspoon) of iron powder to 4 litres of warm tap water. I also had another washing up bowl of water to soak my dried leaves in to make them pliable again.

Wearing gloves I took my damp fabric, soaked it in the iron water for a few minutes - it went noticeably rusty coloured. The I wrung it out very hard over the bowl - it mustn't be too wet. You can use an old towel to help for larger pieces of fabric. The I laid the fabric down on a rolled out piece of cling film and started arranging the leaves. We had been told that for some leaves the back prints better than the front due to the pores on the underside of the leaf. As I had short poles to fit into my pan all my pieces of fabric were folded so you can see in the piece above that there is quite a difference on the front and back for quite a few leaves.

Then I rolled the fabric and cling film together very firmly around my pole to ensure close contact between the fabric and the leaves. You can see that I covered my underlying pole with foil to ensure that any natural colour in the wood did not transfer in the process.

At the end of the fabric I went once round again with the cling film to seal the whole bundle so that the steam can't get in. Finally I bound it tightly with the strips of pantyhose.

Then they were ready for the pot! 90 minutes steaming is required so you need to keep checking up that it hasn't boiled dry.

You can see that I was forced to use a camping burner in the garage, which at least meant that the kitchen wasn't full of steam and the smell of hot leaves! At the end you need to take the bundles out with tongs and leave to cool before unwrapping and removing the spent leaves.

The unwrapping is pretty exciting! In the piece above on silk dupion I put circles of red and brown onion skin between the leaves to see what happened. You then have to leave the fabric to 24 hours to ensure the pigments fully combine with the fabric before washing in the machine with non-bio delicates liquid on the wool/silk wash again.

Cercis and oak on silk habotai

Cercis and oak on silk organza

Various leaves on silk Noil

The I found out that you could use the same process on paper - any kind of paper that will stand being soaked. I used lining paper and got really good results. I loosely folded the paper and left it to soak in the iron water. Then held it over the bowl for to drain off until it didn't drip any more. The rest of the process was just the same.

Leaves laid on damp paper

Bundle just unrolled with spent leaves

Dried result

Alder leaf on paper

Obviously you can't wash the iron out of the paper but it was quite wrinkled from the binding so I soaked some small pieces in water for a few minutes and ironed flat underneath a tea towel. I have started making these into lovely cards.

Finally I tried a different version which we were told only works with certain kinds of eucalyptus on wool or silk and uses white vinegar instead of iron. I had noticed that there was a very tall eucalyptus tree on the edge of our local park - it had no lower branches that you could take leaves from but over winter a branch came down in a storm and on my daily walks I have been bringing bits of it home! It is basically dead by now and very brittle so I gave it a soak overnight in water to try and soften it a bit. The silk was left to soak for 30 minutes in warm water with a good splash of white vinegar. Other than that the process was the same, except the steaming is for 3 hours!

You can see I tried to keep small stems together with the seed heads and I was astounded by how beautiful this was. I was lucky that this was the right type of eucalyptus to print orange using this process.

Experimenting with tissue paper

This project started out as book making with Anne Kelly but ended up in a very different place - with clothing made from fabric printed with my own design!

Anne Kelly invited us to make a concertina book using a thin backing fabric with memorabilia pasted down using watered down PVA and then laminated on top with thin white tissue paper. This could then be stitched into, either by hand or with machine embroidery, and hand coloured with Inktense pencils. The suggestion was to make a book about a trip we had made. At the time I had no working printer so decided to test the concept by making a book about my garden.

I chose images from seed packets and gardening magazines and stuck them down onto some thin curtain lining. I used builder's PVA watered down 50:50 with cold water. You had to make sure that you did this on a well protected surface with a plastic covering. I laminated this with white tissue paper, being careful to smooth out any bubbles and creases with a wide pasting brush. The tissue paper is very fragile when wet so you can only smooth so far before it breaks!

Using a hairdryer to speed up drying time, I dried it off thoroughly and was left with the following curling, slightly cloudy result.

This is then ironed flat with a hot iron, using baking paper to protect the iron. The concertina folds are then ironed back in. At this point you can stitch round items or hand colour them to pick out and highlight certain details, or add additional lines, patterns or stitch images to link the images together. 

The surface this process produces is very pleasing - almost feels like vellum - and because of the PVA I think it would be very durable. I had a go at hand colouring the butterfly image with Inktense pencils, which was very successful. However, I wasn't after a colouring book activity and the cloudy images were not inspiring me to stitch it.

What was happening on the back did inspire me. Because I had lots of diluted PVA left over I experimented with covering the back with paper tissue flowers.

This was the result - I quite liked how the green tissue leaves bled into the surrounding fabric. Some of my stitching friends were very positive about the look of these flowers and said they would like a scarf printed with them. Which led to me cut out strips of all the colours of tissue paper I had to see which colours bled.

I really liked the overall look of this which led me to make a collage of tissue paper strips glued down onto thin fabric - I really like bright colourful patterns!

I love how the tissue paper overlaps and makes new colours. This doesn't have the white tissue lamination layer over the top but was ironed flat when dry. 

As this is a stitch challenge I added black free machining around each of the tissue shapes with blach thread to make a very graphic design. I was thrilled with this and uploaded the photo to bagsoflove.co.uk to have it printed and made up onto a neck tube and polar fleece neck warmer. I was amazed and delighted by the final product - the printed pieces really show the original surface of the tissue paper and the areas of overlap etc. It feels very special to wear something you have designed yourself!

I then had a request to make one in a less crazy colour way so made a blue/black/purple/silver piece with navy blue stitching and had it made up into a fleece neck warmer in the same way.

Finally, I experimented with a more considered design of flowers.

I pasted the flowers down with diluted PVA, this time on a coloured tissue paper background, on a backing of muslin.

I then stitched free-motion spirals in a variegated thread to emphasise the flowers and added leaf vein details with Inktense pencils.

Rosehips - embroidery on sheer fabrics

This piece, called Rosehips, is my response to a workshop led by Vinny Stapely. She encouraged us to pick a wild flower or plant, make a drawing to get a simple outline and then cut it out of 3 different sheer fabrics and, after stitching it down, embellish with embroidery. She showed us some beautiful pieces of her own work, which were all on sheer fabrics.

I have been working on this since early October, where I kept seeing wild rosehips on my local walks so I decided to chose them for my plant subject. In addition, I had seen an piece of work with a ploughed field as the background and couldn't get this out of my mind so went with that composition.

I started with drawing out my rose stems and placing on collected rose leaves and hips to work out the scale of my composition.

I saw that I could make the leaves life-sized as I had picked the smaller sprigs of leaves so I set about printing from them onto different colours of organza and also straight onto Bondaweb using different shades of green acrylic paint. I painted the back of the leaf on a spare scrap of fabric, used a printing roller to press the leaf down onto the organza and then used a wet wipe to clean up the excess paint.

I had extra green paint left over so used that to paint some random marks which could look like grass, again onto different shades of green organza and chiffon. At this point I wasn't sure if I would use these in this project but it is good to experiment and I keep all these painted pieces and they might be useful in a future project if not.

Next I mixed up some brown acrylic paint and painted my ploughed field background straight onto Bondaweb, which gives quite a subtle effect when dry. I left this to dry on the backing paper before cutting it to shape using my original drawing as a template.

Then it was time to start constructing the background. Vinny had shown us a piece with a border of sheer fabric around the edge, which I thought looked beautiful so I cut a larger square of net curtain for the backing of my piece. I did use some spray starch on it to give it a bit more structure. Then I set a smaller square of muslin on top and attached to the net with a running stitch all around. I cut a piece of pale blue chiffon for the sky and attached that with a small running stich all around, before ironing down the painted 'field' Bondaweb.

I felt that the field needed more definition, so decided to add and overlay of gold organza plus some strips of gold dressmaking lace, which kind of looked like crop stubble. These were attached with rows of irregular running stitch. I was conscious of Vinny's advice to plan your background carefully as any stitching will show through against the light. I added some cloud shapes in blue organza to the sky to break it up a bit.

Finally I added torn pieces of the wet wipe mop up cloth as trees on the horizon line and layered up the painted grasses strips in the foreground. To attach the latter I used repositionable spray glue, as suggested by Vinny. I have never used this product before but it worked reasonably well.

Then it was onto the rose stems. I used quilting cotton backed with Bondaweb and traced off all the shapes from my original drawing. I remembered to number all the pieces and my drawing so that I could re-assemble the twiggy jigsaw on the backing again. When I was happy with the positioning of them all I ironed them down. I cut out the printed leaves and began experimenting with where to place them. I settled on the arrangement in the photo above. All the leaves on top of the field section could just be ironed down as the Bondaweb already covering the field was strong enough to come through the organza overlay and grip the leaves. The ones at the top and bottom had to have a small oval of Bondaweb put underneath to hold them down. This was essential as these fabrics fray very easily and that wasn't the look I was going for!

Next I backed some red satin with Bondaweb and cut out the rosehips and positioned them onto the piece, before ironing down. After that all I had to do was complete the embroidery of the detail. I started with backstitching the main leaf stems using 3 strands of floss in backstitch. Then I moved onto the leaf veins. This took a long time as I had to ensure that the stitches followed the line of the stitching on the back and the front otherwise when you hold it up to the light you would be able to see confusing 'jumps' between stitches, which would spoil the effect. I used a single strand of floss for the veins.

I finished by adding small twig details with 2 strands of brown floss in backstitch, details on the ends of the rosehips using a single strand of black floss and a small row of backstitch in red silk thread on the 'belly' of the rosehips. For the detail on the ends of the rosehips I used the technique taught to us by Emily Tull to curve a long straight stitch by adding a small stab stitch across the stitch at the point you want it to bend.

Here is the finished piece taped to the window to show it with the light through it. I am pleased with the overall result. The main area that could have been improved is taking the field part all the way to the bottom of the piece to avoid the hard line across the foreground. I could have disguised this with a semblance of a fence behind or in front of the rose stems in the foreground but I already feel I have spent enough time on this piece so will leave it for now.

3D Forms

This stitch workshop was led by 'assemblage artist Clarissa Clarenden. She works in 3D and she made an interesting comment that many artists come to textiles because you can get textiles to mimic many other mediums. She encouraged us to make random stuffed shapes, stitch them together to make a small abstract wall plaque.

We started by cutting out roundish or rectangularish chunks of fabric and sewing a gathering stitch around the edge. As we started to gather up the stitches we pushed fibre fill or toy stuffing in to make small, irregular stuffed shapes. We were encouraged not to think about the shape of the fabric too much - just hack it out very roughly and stitch the shape and stuff it very intuitively. 

I decided to approach this by selecting a colour palette of turquoise, browns and yellows mostly drawing on scraps of furnishing fabrics, which I haven't found much of a use for up to now.

You can see that I ended up making quite a few long pointed shapes as well as some more rounded ones and tiny balls. A lot of my fabric frayed quite badly but I left that visible and made a feature of it. You can vary the shapes in a number of ways:

• Varying how tight you pull up the gathering thread - if you pull if very tightly you can can ripple or curl the shape
• Stitching through the shape to make dimples, folds or other deforming marks
• Adding stitching or other decoration on the surface, either before or after making the shape
• Wrapping the shape with thread, yarn or wider strips of fabric
• Enclosing objects, especially if you use sheer or lacy fabric

I experimented with adding some surface detail with metallic nail varnish to some of my shapes to emphasise some of the dimples. In addition, I rubbed on metallic wax colour on some areas of the shapes to pick up the surface texture and make the shape look more worn.

Another technique Clarissa showed us was knotting. She took a long length of fabric and knotted it extensively, with knots on top of knots to make new forms. I had a go at this with sari silk strips, fabric strips and knotting multiple threads together.

Finally I had to assemble all this together into something. This was harder to do than you would think as you had to stich it firmly through the various shapes from the back so that it would hold the shapes together as you had them in your hand. I eventually ended up with this conglomeration, which I called 'Reluctance' because I fought the process of making this all the way to the end! (Still looks like entrails to me!)