Silk eco print experiments

After eco printing paper I was keen to start printing on silk. I bought India Flint's books Eco Colour and Second Skin and was stunned by he possibilities. I didn't know where to start. I tried printing using frozen flowers. These are morning glory flowers with an old rusty nail.







I tested many kinds of leaves. Here are peach.

These are eco prints of red canna lilies. They gave 2 pigments, a blue purple as well as a red violet.

During a visit to Rotorua I collected 5 bottles of water from steaming pools but none of them gave me good prints. However some leaves that my husband and I gathered in the dark gave the print below. I used seawater with rusty nails as the mordant. I was thrilled with the detail.













Finally I tried boiling up some fronds of the male fern ( an introduced weed) to make a dye. I was rewarded with a lovely green.