Eco-Printing Beauty!!!

Success!!!

I finally have some successful eco-prints and I am over the moon with how they came out!  :)

1.  Rose leaves on silk with iron mordant. Boiled for 1 1/2 hrs - some iron in the water also...

                   2.  This one is...

                            ...yellow and red onion skins on silk with an iron mordant...

3.  Geranium leaves, geranium flowers and marigold flowers - silk with iron mordant...

             The geranium leaves/flowers turned purple from the iron, the marigolds turned green...

           4.  This last one is rose leaves and Goldenrod flowers...

             Anything yellow turns green with the iron mordant/water bath... rose leaves were
   variations of purple, gray and green in the pieces....

:) :)  So happy  :) :) 

These two scarves had red maple leaves on them and did the leaves did not print, but they did leave a few markings from the stems and leaf veins. The leaves died a faint pink color on the silk...  

I'm re-printing these this afternoon with some three different types of rose leaves. Should be interesting...

*** UPDATE:  I eco-printed these two scarves again this afternoon with just rose leaves and I used plastic wrap to separate the layers so I got one solid print of each leaf cluster, not many of the same thing. Freaking awesome results!!! It is the exact result I have been working for! I will post the pictures in the next couple of days! They are hands down my absolute favorites!!! :) :) :)  ***

These are my tools, an old stainless steel pot with a strainer insert... I never cooked with it so it became the dying pot! Once you start dying in/with a utensil don't use it for food anymore.

disposable metal buffet trays are where I dye and mordant the fabrics... this is leftover iron mordant, I've re-used it a couple of times.  I'm going to wet the two scarves I am re-printing in it later.

If any of this process interests you, these are some sites I have used to research how to go about eco-printing:

terriekwong.blogspot.com

obovate.wordpress.com

indiaflint.com

inleaf.blogspot.com

They have all been invaluable in some way or another while I have been researching this process.

Sunday I picked up several cheap composition books at the market. I covered the front of them in white contact paper and spent the afternoon doodling all over them with a black Sharpie...

inspiration from, Alisa Burke, seriously, this woman is amazing! The contact paper idea came from something she did with her dishwasher, check out her July post called doodled dishwasher.  

I'll use these for school lesson notes, school/home project idea notes, etc...

I'm putting the edging on a shawl I started last week... it's from a graph I found on-line in Russian or something like that ( can't read it...)  after working on it for a little while I starting thinking there was something very familiar about the pattern... it came to me after I screwed up a couple of rows and had to rip them out, it felt like deja-vu...  then it hit me! It's the same pattern as the South Bay Shawlette! The only difference is the main stitch is a Treble crochet instead of a double crochet! I knew that screw up seemed familiar! Funny how I didn't realize it until I messed up the pattern! I make the same silly mistake every time I make a South Bay! I go on auto-pilot and mess up the repeats all the time with that one! I never realize it until the next row when things are out of wack!  

Well, that's all I've got for today! I'm going to go gather my rose leaves in the garden so I can re-print those two scarves! 

Have a good week all!  :)