HOW TO ECO PRINT WITH FLOWERS | NATURAL DYE | REVEALING MY SECRET TECHNIQUE

hello welcome to my channel or welcome back to my channel where we talk about all things natural dyeing and i share natural dye tutorials with you for today's tutorial i'm going to be using this beautiful bouquet of wildflowers that grow here locally to me these are green thread they're also known as dallas firma or navajo tea green thread are considered to be a good dye flower they contain the flavonoid lulin which is considered to be a moderately color fast flavonoid and they grow locally to me and they are growing plentifully this year they are lining all of the roadsides so they're easily sustainably harvested where i picked this amount there was probably three or four more acres around me full of green threads if you are looking for a local to you wild flower that you can use yellow flowers are usually a good source sometimes not if you want to dive deeper into how to identify and forage plants locally to you and how to identify and classify good dye plants check out the resource links that are in the description box so in a pasta tutorial i showed you how to bundle dye in bundle dyeing you're just intuitively putting down the dye stuff and the flowers onto your fiber before rolling it and steaming it to transfer the color from the dye stuff and onto your fiber eco printing is similar but the difference is the outcome with bundle down you get this really beautiful watercolorist type pattern with eco printing the goal is to be able to see the definite outliner shape of the flower or plant that was used to make the print so i'm going to be showing you a few examples of eco printing and bundle dyeing and even some mixtures of the two techniques together because that's also a possibility so here's a piece of fabric that was eco printed and you'll be able to see the definite shape and outline of the plants that were used of eco printing this was made coreopsis flowers and here's an example of a mixture of eco printing and bundle dyeing where some eco printing techniques were used as well as some bundle dyeing to get some more texturized backgrounds with the flower prints as well and this is also a mixture and then here are some that were just made using the bundle dyeing technique all in its bones so there's a whole set of terminology that goes along with eco printing and because this is a beginner's tutorial i'm not going to jump into all of them but there are a couple that you might hear me mention today so we are going to be using target fabric which is the fabric that we are going to be putting our flower prints on to today so it's the fabric that you want your color to transfer onto and in today's tutorial i'm going to be using some cotton and some bamboo silk and also some cotton that was soaked with iron and we'll talk a little bit more about fabric in just a minute i'll be mentioning dowels which is these wooden dowels that i will be using a steamer which can look like a vegetable steamer or it can look like a built-in steamer in a pot it depends on what bundling method you choose to use and i'll be showing you two so one that you won't have to have a really large pot for and one that you will you're also going to hear me mention barriers and barriers are pieces of plastic or paper or cloth that are laid down on top of the flowers and rolled into the bundle so that you don't have bleed through so you get really clean prints and for today's tutorial i'm going to be using some recycled plastic this was packaging that came on something that i ordered there are some techniques and tutorials that call for single use plastic such as saran wrap and a lot of eco printers are achieving really beautiful unique results using single-use plastic but i would like to highly encourage you to experiment with recycled plastic or cloth or paper instead it kind of takes the eco out of eco printing when we're using non-sustainable products to make our eco-printed fabric and a really neat thing about using craft paper i wish i had some so i could show you is that sometimes you not only get eco printed fabric then you get ankle printed paper as well that can be used for wrapping paper or other projects and it's actually really beautiful so some other supplies that we are going to need are like i said a pot so you can have a large pot if you're going to be wrapping a dowel rod i'm going to show you a method of wrapping that doesn't include a dowel rod and it's much smaller so you can use a smaller pot you're going to need a heat source you're going to need some cotton string or rubber bands or i like to use ace bandages for my bundle wraps um so if you have any that are old and you're not going to use them for injuries anymore it's great for wrapping your ego prints you're going to want a pair of scissors the plants are flowers that you're going to be using for eco printing and yeah i think that's it besides the fiber that you're going to be laying your flowers down on so now we can jump into how to eco print so when it comes to choosing a target fabric a lot of eco printers will choose silk silk takes prints really beautifully i've also found the cotton takes prints really beautifully it does need to be more interested and pre-treated and i will post links with information about how to do those processes in the description box so i really enjoy using cotton for my eco prints i don't like to work with animal fibers so that's just a personal choice of mine every fiber is going to take the print a little bit differently the color results will be a little bit different the amount of bleeding will be a little bit different so it's just something to consider when you're thinking about what type of fabric to choose for your eco prints something else to consider is the amount of time that you allow your eco print to steam i have found with flowers they need a really short steam time so i like to steam them for about 15 minutes maximum otherwise i start to see a lot of bleeding taking place it depends on the flower that you choose to use to the plant some flowers will bleed more than others it's just the nature of the flower coreopsis is a beautiful eco-printing flower they're not quite ready to bloom here in texas yet but when they are you can be sure that i will be printing with coreopsis okay so let's get started so the first step is going to be wetting your fiber out and then squeezing as much of the excess liquid out of it as possible i like to actually run mine through a spin cycle on the washing machine because i find that it leaves no extra moisture in my fiber and that's kind of the ideal dampness for eco printing some eco printers will just directly spray water with a spray bottle onto their dry fabric before laying their plants onto their eco prints so that's another technique that you can experiment with i'm just going to lay it flat on the table and smooth out as many wrinkles as you can and then you're ready to start laying your flowers down onto your fabric when it comes to arranging your flowers on the fabric it's really up to you there are a couple different techniques i like to mirror my fabric which means i would lay fat flowers on half of my piece and then fold the top over like so so i'm making a sandwich between the two pieces of fabric in my flowers i find that i get cleaner prints this way you can also lay flowers down on the entire piece and roll that way so it's really up to you and up to the desired outcome that you're hoping to achieve for this i'm going to go ahead and do the mirrored effect to show you what that looks like and then i will also do the other method to show you what that looks like so i like to just make a fold line on my fabric by folding it in half so i can see where the halfway mark is on my fabric and then you like you can lay flowers you can also lay the stems and leaves to see if that gives a print i know that these stems and leaves will give a print many yellow flowering plants do have that ability so you can just test it out on the flower that you're using and see if the stems and leaves give a print [Music] and when it comes to dallas sperma or green thread i like to save the stems because the stems will give color on a die pot so i'll save those and dry those out so i can use them for an immersion dyeing project later do okay so once you feel satisfied with the placement of all your flowers on your fabric you can go ahead and fold the top over all right so now that your cloth has been folded over and you have a sandwich that consists of cloth flowers cloth you're going to want to take your barrier whatever you choose to use and lie it down right on top i'm going to carefully tear in my fiber because i'm going to be rolling it like so and this is when you will get your dowel rod so this part is maybe the most difficult to do at first um it still depending on what barrier you use can be a little bit challenging but you just want to get as tight of a roll as possible without shifting your flowers around too much so i like to just lay my dowel straight down on top and these flowers have quite a bit of green attached to the bottom of them so they're a little bumpy so it's not going to make it super easy on me but i just start rolling straight from the bottom and i use my fingers to press along to make sure that i'm getting as tight and even as a roll as possible okay so now my roll is rolled as tightly as i feel like i can get it to go and i'm gonna wrap mine with this ace bandage on the next bundle i'll show you how to wrap it with string if you don't have an ace bandage that you can use this plastic is particularly slippery now i'm going to pin it for the safety pin and this bundle is ready to go into the steamer so here i have my bamboo silk and i'm going to be just going ahead and laying the flowers all over this one and not doing the mirror print so you can see what the difference will be in the outcome of the prince you can use the same technique i showed in my bundle dyeing where you roll again now if you choose to go ahead and roll again you might get some bleed through from the flowers being rolled on each other here at the very end so you could also just bundle with some string at this point [Music] so here we have my iron tree piece of fiber iron can be used in a multitude of ways for eco printing i'm using it in the most simple way for today's tutorial where i just made a very weak iron water solution using ferrous sulfate and i dip my fiber into that iron solution i'm not going to go too deeply into iron but i do cover iron and a lot of the resources that i'll be linking in the description box below so i'm also going to use the mirror technique for this one so i'm going to fold over and get my crease my halfway mark just like i did on the first bundle unfold i think i want to turn this way for this this one and now i'm just going to arrange my flowers in the very same way that you saw me arrange them before [Music] okay and so now i have my flowers all laid out i'm going to go ahead and fold my fiber over but before i forget the main purpose of me using iron on this piece was to satin and darken the colors so it's going to give a different color result like i said there's a whole variety of reasons to use iron and natural dyeing but the reason i'm using it for this eco print today is to satin and darken the color results and so i am going to use the dowel rod for this one but i'm going to use string instead of the ace bandage wrap so you can see what that looks like as well all right so now we have our three bundles and they are ready to go into the steamer for 15 minutes so i'm gonna put mine in my pot and with steamer steam them for 15 minutes and i will be back to show you the results alright so my bundle steamed for 15 minutes and i let them cool off a bit so i can handle them without hurting myself and now i'm going to unwrap them foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] so you can see that the clearest and cleanest prints came from my bundle that i wrapped with the ace bandage so that's why i really like that method it gives really clean prints so i'll just show you again and then the middle ground was the bundle that i rolled on the dowel but then bound with string so there is more bleeding on this one and you know i think with this particular flower and that method because it's less protected because it doesn't have the ace bandage around it i could have maybe steamed this for five minutes and gotten a lot less bleeding so that's something to play with and something that i'll play with the next time that i use these flowers i don't usually use these flowers these aren't my normal eco printing flowers so this is kind of an experiment for me too and then you'll see that the messiest one was definitely the bundle that i bundled without a dowel rod it definitely got a lot wetter than the other bundles this one i think was gonna bleed regardless but i think that with a much shorter steam time it could have done better so you can see here now i kind of really like this look and i mean they're all different they're all neat i think i'm going to after i wash this out i'm going to over dye this so the colors in the background will blend with some of the colors from the dye pot and i think that will be a really cool effect so at this point you're finished besides just giving them a good rinse it's up to you whether you want to add a little bit of ph neutral detergent in there some people like to let theirs dry all the way before rinsing i've experimented both ways and haven't found a big difference in results between rinsing right away and letting them dry first if your fiber is properly pre-treated then the dye has already bound onto the mortons and the fiber and made a strong insoluble bond so you don't need to worry so much about the dye rinsing out whatever rinses out now is going to rinse out anyways it's the excess that did not bind onto the fiber thank you so much for following along with this tutorial i hope that it was helpful for you if you have any questions at all please feel free to drop them in the comments or you can hop on over to my instagram and reach me there hope that you all have a wonderful day you

Channel: The Barefoot Dyer

Views: 162,767

Keywords: How to bundle dye, How to natural dye, bundle dye, How to dye with flowers, How to naturally dye, Naturally dyeing at home, Dyeing with onion skins, onion skin dye, how to dye with onion skins, how to dye with avocados, how to mordant, botanical dye, how to eco print, tie dye, how to tie dye, how to tie dye with plants, plant dye, how to dye with plants, how to naturally dye cotton, how to mordant cotton, how to dye cotton with flowers, ecoprinting, ecoprinting with flowers

Id: m1mPeGaDPsw

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021