Nicola Brown Eco Printing Tutorial - Part 1

[Music] thank you hi and welcome to class Sheen in County Carlow rural South East Ireland my name is Nicola Brown and I'm a textile artist very interested in being as sustainable as possible in my practice and what I'd love to share with you is a process called Eco printing and Eco printing is where you are making a direct contact print with either leaves bark or onion skins on fabric and being environmentally Mindful and health conscious my practice entails doing this without using traditional powdered mordants and what they are are the powdered chemicals that are used to fix color on fabric so what I want to do is I want to share with you how to create some beautiful prints on your fabric without using these chemicals and there are only certain types of vegetation that are suitable to use with this process and two that are really fantastic are eucalyptus leaves and onion skins and I'm sure regardless of where you live you have access to onion skins the dry papery outside of any onion that doesn't smell horrible and I certainly advise you not to use the fleshy part of the onion otherwise the fabric that you are printing is going to smell revolting and here I have an example of a lambswool tunic that I have printed using onion skins from my kitchen and then there are little Speckles of color here and they are actually from a sprinkling of black tea and one of the reasons I particularly love onion skins is because even if you're a beginner you can achieve fantastic results but they're also available all year round and regardless of where in the world I teach students everybody is able to get onion skins but eucalyptus leaves such as I've used here to print this upcycled cashmere dress eucalyptus leaves give wonderful color as well and this is totally color fast and washable very important to me because when I'm creating something whether it's an art piece or it's something to be worn or used in the house I want to make sure that it lasts for many many years and in the case of clothing the color is not going to rub off so if I sit on a white couch for example with this dress on the color that I have printed the dress with is not going to transfer onto the furniture so the easiest fabric to Eco print without mordens is protein based and in simple terms that's anything that's come from an animal so a wool or cashmere mohair and felt handmade felt is a wonderful Fabric and in this case this is a felt scarf that I've made and I combined silk on one side and wool on the other for this particular piece and in fact um I printed this quite a number of years ago and I've worn it a lot and it was actually printed with the leaves from the tree behind me here it was the very first time I had used these leaves for printing it's a variety of eucalyptus but unfortunately I don't know the name of it so what we're going to do now is we're going to go down and we're going to set up an Eco printing pot and I'm going to share with you a tutorial about how to Eco print using onion skins and if you also wish eucalyptus leaves but you don't have to print on felt as I'm going to be doing you could choose to print on any wool fabric or you could upcycle a garment again wool cashmere or mohair and you can use exactly the same process that I'm sharing with you to upcycle the Garment but it's important to prepare correctly so that it can receive the color and so it will be as bright afterwards as possible and that you're going to get the best result so the way that you need to prepare your fabric before Eco printing is you need to give it a very very good wash with hand hot water and using a gentle soap such as an olive oil soap you could also use a handmade goat's milk soap something very gentle not an eco-friendly washing powder not an eco-friendly washing liquid either because many of those have stain blasters in them they might have some lemon juice or something to remove color from textiles what we want to do is encourage the leaves or the onion skins to give a direct contact print and the olive oil or the goat's milk soap is a gentle way of preparing the fabric and it really gets the best results you need to trust me on that so let's just put these away we'll sort out a new Eco printing pot from the very beginning an aluminum pot then we'll gather some leaves and I'm going to share with you how to lay them out and create your Eco bundles so let's go now and set up the Eco printing pot [Music] so setting up your first dirty pot is very simple if you want to have good results I highly recommend that you use an aluminum pot and all that's going in this is water and some vinegar I'm going to be putting a piece of rusty metal in as well and I have a string tied to this so I can tie it to the handle and then you can add some optional eucalyptus leaves which I will do or onion skins do not add anything else into your pot so this is just plain water I have a well but I have discovered when I'm teaching abroad you can use any water even if it's from a regular City Supply the important thing is that you bring your pot liquid to a boil and you maintain the temperature there needs to be enough liquid in the past that your bundles will go underneath but there's no point filling the pot to the very top unless you have a lot of bundles because we're trying to conserve energy and I'm just adding vinegar approximately half a liter and a chunk of rusty metal which I have on a string and this just means I can lift the metal in and out of the pot if I need to and then I have a selection of eucalyptus leaves these are windfall leaves from my own trees but you can use any eucalyptus leaves or you can add some onion skins if you want to get a strong color to the pot liquid foreign and once the leaves are in I put the lid back on again and the important thing is to bring this pot liquid to a boil and if it's this is the first time as it is here that I'm using it I like this to boil for approximately one hour before I put my textiles into the pot but for future use I just bring it up to a boil and I keep reusing the pot liquid for months on end probably the longest I've used it for is six months and the only reason I ended up throwing out that liquid was I was going away to teach abroad for a while but you just keep reusing the liquid and each time it's used again you get more intense prints from the pot so we'll just leave that to go for a boil now and it's time to go up to the studio and prepare the fabric [Music] when you're Eco printing without powdered mordens it's significantly easier to get good color and prints on protein based Fabric and in simple terms that's fabric that's made from animal material so it could be wool silk cashmere mohair and what I'm going to be printing today I've made two pieces of handmade felt and so they are made with Merino with wool and because cellulose fiber which is made from Plants such as cotton eucalyptus banana fiber that doesn't take the color as well what I have actually done with my felt is I have used some of the cellulose fiber to embellish the felt it's shimmering here in white and then you're going to see after this is printed that this is more obvious on the surface of the felt and that's because the wool will absorb the natural color better than the cellulose will so if I'm actually printing linen or cotton upcycling clothing or something I need to do a different preparation beforehand with my fabric so it's very very simple in addition to the aluminum pass that I'm going to be cooking the bundles in I just need some vegetation to put onto my Fabric and onion Skins are my top recommendation for somebody who's new to Eco printing and also as an experienced Eco printer I love the colors that they give and I find if I'm actually showing my work to people often they love the colors from the onion skins the best and something that's really interesting when you look at the onion skin if I look at this piece here it's got a curve the outside portion of the skin actually gives a stronger color than the inside portion and when I'm going to lay out the felt you'll notice that I put some pieces of the skin with the outside in contact with the fabric and some with the inside and then afterwards when I open the pieces and when they get washed out you're going to see different colors from the whichever piece of the onion skin was in contact with the fabric I've also got a few eucalyptus leaves here and one of the reasons that eucalyptus are so amazing for people who are working without chemicals to fix the color is the fact that they give color that's totally washable and color fast the phrase for that is called substantive color so if I use these leaves I can get beautiful prints and design on my Fabric and I know that the fabric can be washed forever more afterwards and it's not going to fade and lose the color and I have leaves here from three different varieties of my own trees and something that I love looking for when I'm gathering my leaves I like looking for leaves that have little nibbles out of them because they can give a really interesting pattern and it's funny because some Eco printers they're always looking for that perfect Leaf but I'm actually looking for that imperfect leaf and then the only other things that I really need are I need string to tie my bundle and a pair of scissors to cut the string but there are some optional things so I find when I'm working with with protein based Fabrics such as wool silk cashmere or mohair if I sprinkle the fabric The Damp fabric with vinegar I can also enhance the color that I get vinegar is considered to be a modifier it's not a chemical that helps fix the color but it does modify the colors that I can achieve and I'm also going to select a pipe to roll my bundles on now this is optional but if I harness the power of the metal it could be something like this is a piece of an old drain pipe from a mill building or it could be a copper pipe from my plumber if I use the cast iron or a rusty metal pipe I get subtly different colors than if I use a copper pipe so I actually have two pieces of felt here today and I'm going to roll one up on copper and I'm going to roll one up on a rusty metal pipe and we'll just see if there is a subtle difference in color when they're printed so let's get going [Music] so the first thing I'm going to do is roll my damp fabric on the table and just stretch it to shape a little bit and I'm going to put it up this way up I'm going to put the onion skins on the side that I have my embellishing fibers because I really want to see those fibers shining and I want to see the effect of them against the onion skins and something that I really enjoyed doing because not everybody has the same size parts that I have if you have a small pot this is a good tip for you rather than trying to roll the piece up as one long uh get a pipe out rather than rolling it up on the pipe like this if you're working in a smaller pot it's really nice to fold your piece in half and you're going to see a really interesting effect with this because with the color that I have in the past there's going to be a dark line up the center of this piece which can look really nice for a wall hanging and I'm going to be able to print on this side here and it will be a mirror image but there will also be leaves on this side so I'm going to put onion skins in the center and leaves on the top and you're going to see a really interesting effect so the first thing I want to do is sprinkle both sides with a little bit of vinegar and I'm quite organic with what I do I'm not obsessing with having this perfectly even thank you this could be white vinegar it could be malt vinegar I also make my own apple cider vinegar and I've used red wine that's gone off but don't confuse the acidity of the vinegar with lemon juice I often get asked that and lemon juice will remove the color so we don't or it will prevent the color we want to make sure that we have color so if your piece is wider than the pot fold it in half press down and then open it up again so that you have a line that you lay the vegetation to the side of that line and from the perspective of your back it's really important not to be stretching too much so I like to keep my fabric that I'm printing close to the edge of the table and also close to the end because when I'm rolling this up I'm going to be at this end so here is the perfect place to lay this out now I'm going to put onion skins on this side and as I've already mentioned you get a different color from the outside of the onion skin and the inside so what I tend to do is Lay some pieces down first and then I'll go back and I'll turn some up and some down so once I've got my onion skins laid out I actually usually stand back a little bit and sometimes I look in the camera of my phone because that way I can see whether I have them laid out to my satisfaction and I'm noticing here that this is a very pale onion skin and the nearer the center of the onion the skin is the paler the color will be whereas this one here which is near the outside of the onion this will give a stronger color so I'm just replacing that skin there and I think I'm happy with that it's quite organic and I have three words that inform everything I do and that's simple natural and crafted I find if I overthink the process it becomes complicated and I'm not so happy with the results so I'm just going to say that's okay and now I fold that other half over and I had that line down the center I'm going to just press the felt down and what I'm actually going to do now is I'm going to lay some leaves on this side so this side of the felt has no embellishing fibers so when it's printed this will be matte and the other side will have a little bit more Shimmer and I think I would like to use some of my eucalyptus leaves now and I'm going to make sure to include some of the leaves that have got nibbles out of them I would never put a big sprig like this down because once it's flattened and rolled up all those leaves merge together so what I actually like doing is removing plenty of leaves so that you end up with something that looks much more see I've ended up with three leaves here but you will now be able to see the beauty of each of those leaves I think I'll turn them that way around and it's absolutely fine to have your onion skins or your leaves going off the edge of the piece if you want to that's not a problem and Stems can be really interesting as well so this particular variety of eucalyptus this is eucalyptus gurneyi Azura it's an excellent tree for a small garden because it doesn't grow too big and it's a really wonderful eco-printing vegetation because the stems and the leaves all give the most beautiful red colors and it doesn't need to be boiled in the pot for as long as some of the other varieties I like cutting across the stem and using two leaves together this can can look very beautiful when you're printing and these particular leaves usually give me a red color so in a similar way to when I laid out The Onion skins I actually just continue laying leaves and then I will assess in a minute whether I'm happy with the design that I have made on the fabric I don't want everything to look really precise but I do want to have some balance of color and I know from experience that these leaves give a good color after a short length of time but these leaves here don't always give me good color and every year when I start Eco printing early in the season I can be surprised by the color I do get and after Heavy Rain such as we've had here in Ireland recently they may give a different color again so that's something I'll be interested in seeing and then finally this is another variety of eucalyptus that I have growing here and this used to be called eucalyptus parvifolia it has been reclassified it's called eucalyptus paravila now but you may still find it sold as parvifolia and this is also a red printing eucalyptus but it gives a subtly different color of red so I'll just lay a few of these leaves down the piece and if you note I'm not placing them all in the same direction so I'm pretty happy with that layout now so what I'm going to do is just remove the leaves from the table and I'm going to get my metal pipe that I'm going to roll this up on and when I'm working by myself this is a really good tip if you don't have somebody in the studio to help you the most important thing with rolling the bundle is to keep it really really tightly rolled and tightly tied you need to make very good contact with your onion skin or your leaves against the fabric and if you don't have somebody to hold the end of the piece I recommend that you put either a bucket of water or a heavy pot at the end so you can pull against it as you see me doing and I'm not concerned with this Leaf coming out over the center here that's fine but when you see this bundle unrolled you're going to see um the effect of that at the edge I have a cast iron or a rusty metal pipe I'm using t-shirt yarn as my tying material it's got a little bit of stretch and I use this multiple times until it actually goes rotten part of being as sustainable as possible in the studio means reusing things and reducing waste wherever possible and this actually has some knots in it where I've tied pieces together but they can form an interesting feature in the piece as you may see we'll see if those knots are visible and now I just need to put something heavy on the end so this will do the job and from the health and safety perspective as I've already said I like to work at the edge of the table and from the end so I'm not stretching too much um I like to keep my bundle centered on my pipe if you don't have a metal pipe you can just roll the fabric up on itself or you can use a piece of wood or you can use a piece of cardboard but in this case I'm using the rusty metal and wear the rusty metal is making contact with the felt that I'm printing I'm expecting there to be modification of color here and you're going to see a band of different color where this makes direct contact and now I need to pull this so you can see that I'm stretching the fabric as I pull it towards me and as I do this I'm hoping to keep this Center Line as straight as possible this is a piece of handmade felt so it's never going to be as precise as something that's commercially made it's got a more organic nature so for me to try and keep the center line straight is the important thing and make the good contact and then as I get to the end I can just straighten it again replace any leaves that have maybe moved and something else that I enjoy doing when I actually tie the bundle I enjoy putting leaves under the string because I'm I have leaves that will be going into the Eco printing pot so there will be some interesting color with string marks afterwards and I'm going to get some of these ready to tie under the string of course you don't need to do this I could just have had onion skins on one side and the piece would be beautiful but this gives added dimension so my knot of choice is called a surgeon's knot and I have to concentrate when I'm tying my piece because it's very easy for the bundle to get looser and you can look on the internet and see how to make the surgeon's knot it's an easy one to undo afterwards so for the surgeon's knot I just put the short end under twice and give it a good a good pull and that's just helping to secure the bundle and now what I'll do is I'll roll the piece away from me and I'm going to start adding some leaves in underneath these just give some added interest and one thing I need to be careful of is not to put the main piece of string over this loose end that's where I'm going to tie my final knot afterwards this takes practice if I'm using onion skins I don't need to to Really worry too much they're a very nice random pattern and Design so if you're using onion skins for your first time don't worry too much just make sure you get your piece tied really tightly so after I've come from where I started to this outside edge I give a couple of turns with the string at the edge and then I start coming back and you can see here that I'm coming back and I'm keeping the string approximately one centimeter each each wrap is about one centimeter from the piece beside it and the reason for this is these are direct contact prints and we must make sure that the bundle is tied tightly enough to get the best prints and as I get near where I started I watch for the knot this was my surgeon's knot here and I just put this piece of fabric under my hand and I keep going to the center line and I'd like to add a couple more leaves here let me see foreign and then once I'm near the center line I go around a couple of times close to the edge of the Center Line and then I come back a centimeter apart back to where I started there are all sorts of different ways of tying but this is what I find works for me and then when I get back to the surgeon's knot I just tie a very simple knot nothing complicated and this is my bundle it's ready for the pot and what I like to do now is I put my hand where the final knot is I bring this string just up the length of my arm up to my shoulder and I cut the string here and the reason that I like to leave this tag on the string is going to become obvious when I put the bundle into the pot but I can tie this to the handle of the pot and I need to set an alarm when my bundles go in the pot and if I have a big Eco printing session maybe with 10 bundles I can just make a note I can tie the string to the handle of the pot in the order that the bundles go in and if I make a note I know how long each individual bundle has been in the pot so here's the Eco bundle ready for processing so for my second piece of felt I'm actually going to use the same vegetation or similar vegetation as the first one but what I'm going to do is fold it so that the side with the embellishing fibers is on the outside of the bundle so this time I'm going to lay the onion skins on the matte side foreign I would never put a sprig like this down without removing certain leaves and sometimes I will actually remove the leaves opposite each other just so that I can make the pattern look more obvious see although it would be easy to get hung up on your design and sometimes it's better just to um not over complicate things I have a lovely Leaf here this one has had the most amazing nibbles out of it and that will be hopefully show some nice um detail in the finished piece so I'll go back down with these eucalyptus paravila leaves foreign might look as if I'm putting these out very quickly but I always consider what I'm doing and I have got experience doing this uh sometimes it will take me half an hour or an hour to work out how I'm going to lay the leaves out but in this case I'm just doing it nice and quickly and I think that's ready to roll up so for this particular piece I'm going to roll up on a copper pipe rather than the cast iron pipe and there will be subtly different colors on this piece of felt than on the other piece of felt and also in this case the onion Skins are laid out on the matte side of the felt and the eucalyptus leaves are laid out on the side with the cellulose embellishing fibers so it will be interesting to see how this affects the finished piece foreign select the copper pipe that I'm going to use the wider the diameter of the pipe the more contact it will make with the fabric so there will be more modification of color and I'm very happy that this slightly wider pipe wider diameter is going to be large enough to roll with so I'm going to choose this pipe rather than this one and even though this is a small piece I do need to make sure I have something heavy at the end this here it's impossible to stress how important it is to tie your bundles really tightly the Eco print is a direct contact print and if there's not enough contact with the vegetation and the fabric you're not going to get a crisp result foreign that the piece of onion skin from the inside has come out so I could either stick it back in or let it sit on the top I'll just tuck it under and if you have a friend or a partner or somebody who works with you in the studio instead of putting something heavy on the end you can just get them to press down on your fabric [Music] oh hey pip good girl you're my loyal companion so in many ways the first knot is the most important because this helps keep everything together urging a surgeon's knot I'll roll fairly quickly up to the opposite end once I've got to the outside edge I'm careful not to go over the edge where it's a bit looser I'm just going to tie this as tightly as possible with a few rows here and this helps prevent all the pot liquid getting in and it helps keep the bundle tight and now I come back with each roll approximately one centimeter from the previous one I'm just adding in a few extra leaves underneath here just for interest and they're going to be very nice hopefully in the finished piece when I get back to the initial surgeon's knot I need to be very careful not to cover it with the string so I'll put that under my hand and put it here put a final few leaves and so once I get to this edge here this folded edge of my fabric is actually the strip that's going to be down the center line of the piece when it's opened up afterwards I need to give it a couple of extra rolls there to make sure it's nice and tight and that the pot liquid doesn't seep in too much at the end and then I just go back to where I started back to my initial surgeon's knot and I'm going to tie this off just keep the final knot very simple I did hearse my elbows at one stage and I had a friend helping me in the studio and she made the not so complicated I ended up that I actually cut four beautiful silk scarves I made a little hole it's difficult enough to cut the string sometimes afterwards so keep the knot simple but make sure it's nice and firm and then the only thing that's left to do now is just to measure the string up to my shoulder and this piece of felt is now ready for the pot [Music]

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Length: 44min 48sec (2688 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023