Ecoprinting on Silk Fabric

good morning is Louis it is a beautiful Labor Day outside for a while there that was the rain but it's not the Sun is coming and today I'm going to experiment with echo printing I'm an artist writer and songwriter I started this YouTube channel because I wanted to share with you some of my heart and ideas and show you a little bit about what's going on here in st. Charles [Music] if you watch my blog a couple of days ago you would know that I meant with fellow artist Diana Lawrence at Queenie Park and she turned me on to something she's been doing called echo printing I have all these leftover vegetables that I have not been eating from my Lake View farms CSA and some of them are beets and carrots and I'm just gonna experiment with a bunch of different flowers and leaves and stuff like that to see how this comes out so there's no guarantee that it's going to come out but we're gonna see how it goes I do a lot of experimenting this might be an epic fail who knows so here are my vegetables that I've cut up in small slices I think the beets I think the beets will do really well and I'm gonna guess that this cabbage leaf will do really well although I don't know how it's going to turn out I'm getting a lot of my information online and I'm gonna go out right now to our cottage garden and around French town and collect some flowers this is my hubby's cottage garden he's kind of taken it over from the previous owners there's a bunch of wild flowers here that attract honey honey bees and butterflies and bumblebees so I'm going to collect a combination of a bunch of leaves and different flowers to see if how they that go plant you can see I have a number of different items here I have some leftover items from my CSA some homegrown beets I'm gonna try some okra it's slimy nasty so it'll need to be washed off but I'm gonna see how it looks on there I had some of this small eggplant I'm going to see how this purple stuff on the outs outer skin imparts color if any we're just gonna monitor and then we have some of this red cabbage we'll see how that goes we still have some begonias from the flower pots out front they're kind of sticky some hosta flowers the bumblebees love hosta leaves we'll see how that goes I don't know if they're too too thick I don't know how they'll do some of these flowers I don't know what kind of flowers there this is all we had left our gut and garden is kind of on the edge though edge of being flowery um it's about ready for fall some of these that the butterflies love some roses there's a couple of roses but for the most part they're just kind of dead headed a bunch there's some nice red leaves we'll see how they impart color some of this some black-eyed Susans some clone flowers that are on their way out it's just going to keep track of what it is we decided to use and how it ends up looking in the end this is a huge experiment it could be an epic fail we don't know so before we get started I've collected on my my plants and leads and vegetables and I am gonna try to experiment with them this is just one big big experiment so I've read several different websites and I guess what turned me on initially was talking to Diane about her Apple printing process so I've been reading different people's blogs and watching YouTube channels about how to do this properly and I haven't really found a method I think it's gonna work for me at this point so I'm experimenting if an epic fail it may be a wonderful happy accident is Bob Ross likes to say just happy accident but what I'm going to start with and what I found is that we need to have some sort of a mordant in order to be able to get the cell to bond with the natural fiber natural dyes so what I'm going to use this a mornin is what I happen to have on hand and I don't know if you can see this this is called alum and we're just like the album's getting this to war like the spice section and for mixed spices section on a large scale I have enough more than here to last me probably a lifetime I use this morning for silk marbling a process which I will show you in the future via YouTube but for now I'm going to use this to try to play with my natural bags the instructions according to diorama and I'm going to go with them first is to use two teaspoons per couch I have two gallons of water here hot water that came out of the asset so I'm going to put four table 4 teaspoons of mordant in this solution and let it dissolve and the consensus is the morning helps that you can all if you use too much morning's on your fabric you it'll your fabric will start to deteriorate so we're gonna start with four we're gonna just stir this around a little bit and see if we can get it to dissolve okay so I put this alum in here with some hot water and I stirred it around a little bit I like to keep I like to keep on my silk stuff separate from my food stuff if I'm working in the kitchen alum egg is not really toxic it's just I like to keep them separate is a course of common practice just to keep them separate leave some of the chemicals and dyes that you do work with are toxic and you don't want them being used for anything food related what I got here are a bunch of selections of different types of silks and they are basically just scraps that I haven't used for wall hangings or whatever here's a piece of habit I soaked so we're going to try that because I noticed that a bunch of these artists are using habit I soaked so I'm going to throw that in this mix here I make sure that the soap gets a lot of coverage here so we're gonna make sure that all of this alum water make sure it's every bit of the fabric we're just gonna pile on top of each other his a little thing of charmeuse silk these have already been treated in alum but we're going to go ahead and treat them again just to get them wet I have some crazy sheet a crepe machine blanks this is already found from Dharma trading company measures 14 inches by 60 inches it's great to get scraped machine we're going to try this and I have here a chart that I ordered last year never used if I can roll sparks flying it is a wool and silk mixture now I understand that the Wolves part of it causes some shrinkage when you wash it right now I think it's 14 and measures 14 nights 60 cuz I want to see how the naturals dot how the natural dyes work on the wool as well so we're going to stick that in there I'm gonna make sure that everything's covered well and mixed to make it wet and soak with this solution and then I'm going to leave it in this solution until I'm ready to work with each scarf I've squeezed my first start blank out it is still wet and I laid it on to a half size sheet of newsprint rolled in half so it's double ply basically and it's still wet so it's gonna leave water spots all over the place I'm not really worried about this at this point I want it to be a little bit wet what I'm going to start to do is I've laid the one half of this up and I've got the rest of it kind of just wad it up here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lay my leaves and flowers out on this and then I'm gonna fold it in half on top of it and roll it up I'm gonna start with these vegetables first and lay them out and see what they look like you might make it interesting I don't know it's gonna turn out to be we'll see here is everything is I have it laid out I've kind of interspersed all my veggies together so if it doesn't work and it is a failed experiment the we can eat oh I'm joking I don't want to you know I'm not a beach person so okay and then we're gonna just stick that here so we've got basically a half and half so we just lay this over top split in half here so we'll basically have a a reverse imprint on the backside of all of our vegetable items and it'll be half and half now I noticed that a lot of women who are demonstrating this like to use plastic and they let it sit in their Cena for a couple of hours at a very low heat I'm going to attempt to do this in my silk steamer and as a result I don't really want to wrap it in plastic so I'm just gonna use this newsprint and roll it up this print like I did my previous projects and I just kind of make sure that it's flat hope that it doesn't bleed through hope and pray that that doesn't way through we drew I don't know when it comes out and then we'll roll this into a snake-oil and type it helps to have the seam on the inside of the coil that way you don't have any fabric coming out or your oil doesn't unravel and see because this is what its gonna break a little bit it should be okay because we're gonna unwrap this as soon as we pull it out and as long as we make sure no water spots get on it it's not that big of a deal I don't think on this item just because it's already wet when we put it in there who tied up see I have this crepe de Chien one out and I decided to do the pink flowers so I did some roses and then these the roses had these red leaves that were just beautiful I don't know how how they're going to come out but probably there probably yellow and then these little flowers here kind of look like a drain just but I'm not sure what they are and then um some leaves so we've got pink and red here now whether or not they will actually impart that color is a natural dye we don't know we're gonna see so we again we do the same thing and when I when I put them down I kind of put them down haphazardly some of them are facing downward some of them are facing upward this is a little bit longer but I think we'll be okay cuz we'll just have kind of a blank space in the middle now we're a little bit longer that that's alright I'm gonna fold this over this and then I'm gonna roll this under like this again we're doing the same thing we're gonna roll this up and then we're going to roll it up into a snake and do it carefully because this paper is wet and it will tear and then tie it up with twine or cotton and then we'll steam it next okay ambient noise apologies let me show you what I'm doing I've got here I've got a bunch of handkerchiefs these are ladies handkerchiefs that you can get from Dharma and so I've got one laid out with a bunch of petunia titles and some of the red cabbage so I'm going to lay this other guy right side down on top of this one so I'll have one with front print one what with a reverse print this guy here this little piece of fabric that I had laid out I thought I might used for soaked under glass for some parents for necklaces so I'm going to just use this piece up I just lay it down some leaves and shredded some of the flowers and I soaked soak this guy and some just regular black tea and I used for my iced tea and I it's got a bit of an antiquey kind of aging sort of a just a little bit so I'm gonna lay that over flat and then this guy here you decided to do the whole handkerchief and to keep all these flowers from bleeding all over the place I decided to lay down some tracing paper so we'll see how this tracing paper works and keeping it off keeping the dyes off the rest of the peppers and so we're gonna roll all of these up together there's the final piece of fabric this was just a piece of habit time that was wrong we'll see how it goes I put some of the hosta leaves down I put some of the maple leaves down some of the black-eyed Susans some of these hosta flowers are white I don't know if they'll impart any color but we'll see what happens with it and then this goes and this is all my fabric so I'm gonna roll this up tie it steam it and I'll see you on the other side we are unpacking the steamer to see how things turned out [Applause] this is the first piece I did it smells like dinner with the home vegetables kind of smells yeah too healthy all right haha okay this is really cool actually mmm I used beets if you remember when I put this together I used beets and carrots oh my god that's too funny the this red cabbage actually did a really cool job I came out purple purple it was a straight okra I decided against the okra if you were watching me because it should it's just too slimy I didn't want with it so this came out really interesting does it really look organic it doesn't have leaves images per se and that's kind of it that's cool I really am impressed with how purple these cabbage leaves came out and there might be a possibility for cutting them into flower shapes and getting them flat so that you can get this kind of purple flower effect and then these these flowers right here these are the beets that I had so they came out an orange kind of color sort of a rust color the carrots kind of came out of just a very light orange yellowish color not too particularly exciting but they do add a little dimension to the piece because they're the carrot pieces are sort of square whereas the beets and cabbage are more organic shapes okay so this particular scarf was the wolf salt blend and these were all the vegetables that I did cool I like that so virtually came out purple and orange neat this kind of reminds me of doing clay and there was this even if even if you're a great Potter and you know what certain materials do there's always that sense of anticipation when you open up the kiln for the first time after the items have been fired to see if number one they made it through without any damage and number two how it actually turned out it's almost like you don't know what to expect this is kind of like that this is that feeling you want to see if your experiment is work I don't know what this one was let's see this was also a scarf this was a crepe de chien scarf on the crepe de Sheen scarf I used some of the purple flowers a bunch of the leaves and then there was that center section where I didn't have anything that's okay coloring is a little bit lighter so some of these light pink flowers lost all their color there's really not that much pink here then mostly turned like yellowish greenish there was a little bit of pink pink coloring in the in those tiny flowers and then these are what some of the leaves did you have like a very light leaf image I think these were the roses these were those red red spiky flowers I'm not sure what they were and they did they did impart quite a bit of that pink color sometimes when they when they get steamed the dye actually turns a different color but this one he's kind of these red flowers came out red another thing I've seen people who do this do is they have a core of cardboard or PVC or even copper where they can flatten it out a lot more so I don't have a lot of really good images on here per se just a little little bit sand dabs of color so this is the crank to sheet one with some pink and purple flowers wait here here's the lady's handkerchief with the combination of the cabbage leaves which are these and the petunias which are these kind of purplish yellowish spots and the petunias are kind of gooey icky so you try to get up as much as that as possible you might not be able to get all of it off ultimately we're gonna wash these and so it's not that big of a deal but kind of yucky [Music] this is my favorite scarf out of all of the ones that came out and this was this was the habit I soaked that was dipped in tea and then I put maple leaves on top maple Eason hostas and then I came back after it was all steamed and washed and I added some dyes to the edges so it kind of looks almost like parchment but rather than try to use it for anything else I decided it would make a sufficient scarf in its own right so I just clipped the ends the fringy off the ends and added some a hand rolled hem and I'm gonna sell this as a scarf thanks for joining me on this adventure like I said it was an experiment and I would say it wasn't an epic fail at all I'm gonna say it was a happy accident I had a lot of happy accidents and projects I might take from this in the future so thanks for joining me and here's to trying something new every single solitary day [Music]

Channel: Prettyman Studios

Views: 5,511

Rating: 4.8778625 out of 5

Keywords: eco-printing, ecoprint, silk painting, silk dyeing, silk art, leaves and flowers, natural dyes

Id: pLwPIBqi4nM

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019