Dye With Love

As you know, last summer I became captivated with the Magic of eco dying. At Summer camp I had lots of fun playing around with old cotton fabric and different leaves and flowers that I had gathered on my walks. You also know that I like Creating with purpose.

I decided the next step was to try printing on paper.

I had a few dry runs. Or, I should say wet runs. My first attempts to press leaves between rust-water soaked papers resulted in a bit of a soggy blur. I’ll spare you pictures of that mess!

Through practice, I discovered a few tricks:

• use a good quality paper–I used cold press water colour paper
• wet the leaves rather than the paper
• separate all the leaf layers with parchment paper to avoid bleed through
• stack the papers and press them very tightly between two ceramic tiles
• steam (i.e. not immersed in water) for 90 minutes
• cool completely before unwrapping to peek at the creations

I used six 8″ x 10″ pieces of paper folded in half with leaves in between every layer and every layer separated with parchment paper.

If you are following the math, that means I ended up being able to make a three-section journal, each section with two nested sheets. Folding the sheets in the middle means each section has 8 printed sides and the whole journal is 24 pages.

Some of the parchment papers were too beautiful to discard. I added a few into the journal for secret note space and textural variety.

The original intention was for words to be added free form throughout the journal, but I knew that it might be difficult to dive in and start to write on the flora imprinted pages. I added some lines for encouragement and to give sections for guiding script. I added dyed lined paper, and also stitched in some black lines. I remembered how as a child I had loved running our old Singer treadle machine with no thread over paper pretending to sew. This seemed like a fun idea to add texture and the suggestion of lines.

Next of course, I had to figure out how to bind the whole thing together. A a quick google search lead to directions on how to bind a book with waxed thread.

After binding, there were a few long ends on my threads, which once braided were too nice to cut, so I added some wild turkey feathers, foraged on a summer walk, to serve a book marks.

My dear friend Martha in her retirement is focusing on a love of the written word and expressing herself through poetry. What better reason to create a special journal in which she can scribe beautiful words. This journal was definitely a project of dyeing with love.