Magic

Well, the real term is ‘eco dyeing’, but it feels like magic. In my previous post about Summer camp, I touched on eco dyeing and promised I would elaborate later. Seeing as it is currently one of my favourite things to do, I have been busy and have lots of pictures to share!

Water lilies are taking first place for my favourite eco dye leaves. Earlier, I used water lily leaves and stems on a dry piece of cotton, covered with a ‘wet blanket’ (cotton soaked in iron solution). I loved both the leaf print itself, and the impression that was left on the blanket. Interesting how the green of the leaves showed up, but I also like the dark impressions and detail on the blanket.

With visions of Monet dancing in my head, I was inspired to use water lilies in a bigger project. To start, I would have to gather some lily pads, so we set out in our kayaks to forage on a calm and sunny day. It took no time at all to fill the kayak with lily pads of all sizes. I may have overdone it, maybe a kayak full wasn’t necessary, but I would have lots to chose from.

Back on dry land, I put the lilies into a 5-gallon bucket of water to transport them home and kept them in the bucket overnight until I was ready to try the roll up.

I had recently purchased a 100% cotton sundress and could picture water lilies floating up from the hem on a cool summer day.

Enough of the dreamy visioning though, my mind turned to planning out the technicalities of how to turn my vision into reality. As always, I started with the end and thought backwards. You may think this is a trick used only in computer programming, or reverse engineering, but don’t let that scare you off. Thinking backwards is a great way to come up with challenges to solve. Basically, it means thinking of where, or what, you want to end with and then planning all the steps to get there. I try to remind myself that when you want a functional outcome, this crucial first step gives better results than just ‘throwing it all together and seeing what comes out’!

When thinking about my final piece, how it would look on a moving body; how it would fit into my wardrobe colour scheme; how it would wash; how to best highlight the beauty of lily pads; I came up with a few challenges:

• How could I get a permanent, beautiful background colour, without the orange tinge of the iron dye interfering?
• How should I lay out the leaves to give the desired effect of carefully balanced/random placement?
• How could I work with a ready made dress that has pockets, neck and arm binding and a hem, each with a subtly different thickness and texture?
• How would I print the front and the back of the dress, without the prints bleeding through and muddying each other?
• How should I apply the iron water? Would it be better to use a wet blanket, or wet the leaves, or wet the dress?
• How would I get the mirror image effect on the front and back of the dress, not on a wet blanket?
• How would I roll the leaves and dress up for steaming without creating creases in my prints?

I can tell you, this took some thinking. As I played out the process in my mind, each challenge seemed to present another sub-challenge. I’ll spare you all of that rumination and just share with you the steps I settled on.

Oh yes, one final thing that I often have to do to move myself from planning to executing: Consider the worst case scenario. It could end up as one big mess. But, in this case, all I will have lost is a cheap cotton dress and some time. At some point, you do have to just plunge in and take the first step, remembering that this is all a big experiment, and it’s meant to be fun!

With the dress being a dress, it had seams, arm holes and a neck hole to contend with, and I wanted a mirror image print on the front and back of the dress so I had to figure out how to use the same leaves, keep them from bleeding through where I didn’t want them, and not waste their print on a wet blanket.

First, I soaked the whole dress in an iron water solution and wrung it out until damp. To make the most of the strength of the print, and to make sure it showed on the right side of the pockets (not the inside), I turned the dress inside out, and placed the leaves sandwich style between the front and back so they would have direct contact with both the front and the back. I started with the biggest on the bottom near the hem and floated up to smaller ones near one shoulder in a bit of a wavy drift.

I knew the print would come through to the backside of the fabric and didn’t mind that, but I didn’t want bleed through when I rolled up the bundle. I have been using saran wrap to block in my smaller pieces, but the dress seemed too big for that so I decided to try using parchment paper and it worked a charm. I laid out enough paper to cover both the front and the back completely. In essence, I now had a five-layer sandwich: paper, dress back, leaves, dress front, paper.

The piece was now ready to roll so I chose the longest stick that would fit in my steamer. I carefully folded in the sides of the dress to make it as evenly thick as possible and about 12 inches wide. This was rolled onto the stick, and bound as tightly as possible with string. Next, I popped it into the steamer and waited, ever-so patiently, for 90 minutes…plus another half hour or so for cooling. Then, the great reveal!

The biggest surprise at this step was beauty of the waste parchment paper which had blocked the bleeding by picking up the print. I’ll definitely be using this later.

As for the dress itself, I was pleased with the basic outcome. The leaves were well defined in tones of purplish black. As anticipated, the main colour of the dress was a pale orange from the iron water. I briefly considered leaving it this way, but really the dress is for me and I am pretty much stuck on blues, I still had a water image in my mind, and orange wasn’t very ‘Monet’.

The easiest solution, given my recent foray into indigo dyeing, was to give the dress a few dips in the indigo vat hoping that blue over light orange might make a nice blueish green. Things looked promising when the dress was hung on the line, but after the first rinse and dry, the indigo faded quite a bit (possibly the vat had been tired), and too much of the iron orange was showing through muddying the colour.

OK, one more try. Third time’s a charm right? I decided to deviate from the natural path and treat the dress with a bath in Procion mx dye. I soaked the dress in a soda ash solution for 20 minutes to ensure colour fastness, and then put it in the dye to ‘stew’ overnight. Next morning, a rinse in ice water, hand washing, line drying and a hot ironing finished it off.

Finally, the dress was finished! I love the blue/green background, and the front and back mirror image. A bit of the underlying rust shows through, but I think it adds to the richness of the water effect.

What do you think?