Making wonderful unique eco-print silk scarves from flowers and leaves.
This summer in our area of Portugal the flowers have been stunning, but sadly they don’t stay for long. Wandering through our garden and fields where lots of wild flowers grow always makes me eager to do more eco-printing, and my favourite is to eco-print silk scarves.
Eco-printing is a lovely process – gathering the flowers, working with gorgeous silks and revealing unique eco-prints at the end of the process. It’s always a surprise unravelling the silk and seeing the beautiful patterns and colours – you never know what you are going to get!
Previously I created some more abstract prints which concentrated on colours and effects, but this time I was keen to try something more delicate. I’m really pleased with the results!
Each time I print I learn something new. I took the time this year to do test prints of a lot of the weeds and flowers growing around us so I knew exactly which plants I wanted to use to create these scarves.
A simple eco-print process for silk
The process of eco-printing involves soaking the plants in iron water, preparing the silk, placing the plants on the fabric and bundling (or wrapping) them up very tightly in plastic wrap. The tough bit is the 90 minutes of steaming – it’s hard to wait that long! Then comes the lovely moment of opening the bundles and seeing how the print has worked.
These scarves used two weeds that grow everywhere around us (I don’t even know what they are!). They have given some really nice prints and colours. I didn’t put too much onto the scarves to keep the design more subtle. It’s a joy to use something you would never normally notice to make an item so pretty and delicate.
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