What better way to spend a day off this week than trying some new eco dye techniques?
Go out the day before, collect leaves to print with.
Including some cycad leaves, to see if they had strong enough oils to print. We soaked overnight.
Rather than the usual gum leaf base dye, we tried Elephant Ear, Acacia dunnii. Both the leaves and the pods were boiled and the dye was a kind of purple/brown in the pot.
The round leaves are dried Silver Dollar Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus cinerea. They were pre-soaked in vinegar to try and revive them for dyeing. You usually get a strong, orange print from them.
The top was silk.
Cotton.
A new technique we tried was rather than dipping the whole shirt in rust water, we used an 'iron blanket': a piece of fabric dipped into the rust water that was meant to help the leaves print. I believe you're meant to get clearer prints and less background colour.
I tried it on a couple of shirts.
Some bundles in the steamer.
Laying out a pattern on a blue silk top, to go in the simmering pot in plain water.
The Acacia dye pot all packed in.
This was a fancy layout with two different kinds of onion skins, gum leaves and cinerea.
Beautiful colours.
The Results
Not what was expected. Everything came out pale and with a lot of yellow - very different to my usual black and grey!
Some string marks, but not much of the grevillea or any other leaves that went in there. This was white to begin with, though. Very interesting that I usually get olive green colours from grevillea, but got yellow instead!
Yellow and black, yellow and black.
A bit of grevillea print showing through.
This one is a wash of pale browns and oranges.
But with the string marks still. It kind of looks like it was dyed in tea.
No coffee, dirt or otherwise was spilled on this... just plant dyes!
You can see the yellow grevillea prints.
This iron blanket picked up the spring pattern, but the shirt it was wrapped around didn't.
This red cotton had a few stains on it that aren't noticeable now.
I like how the lace I wrapped in the middle picked up the red as well as the grey and brown.
And the matching spring patterns on either side.
This is probably the best of them: onion skins on lime green silk.
Some interesting shades of colour in there.
And this little top has some interesting patterns down the middle.
As well as some nice colour around the top.
Almost green/blue in there.
I may re-dye some, though I chance losing the water colour look then. They might look nice with some stencils instead. Something to contemplate this weekend!
#lovelypennypatterns
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