Making art with nature

The most important discovery I have made this summer is that nature is at the heart of my wellbeing. Being in and around plants is a balm to my soul and they inspire me to create art with and about them.

My first foray into creating art using plants involved solar dyeing threads in jars, which I have been doing for a few years now. The results vary but I can always use the resulting threads in one way or another. To set up a solar dye jar, I dissolve some alum in a little hot water in my jar before adding my plant material and my threads. Then I screw the lid back onto the jar and leave it somewhere sunny and warm for a period of time. The amount of time varies depending on the colour or shade that I want my thread. When it is ready, I remove my threads and wash them before hanging them to dry. The rest of the contents of the jar go onto the compost heap.

Solar dyed threads wrapped onto a thread card

I grow some of the plants in the garden specifically for dyeing with. Annuals such as marigolds or sunflowers have given me some good results in the dye jar. I have also tried using kitchen waste such as onion skins, red cabbage, beetroot peelings and avocado skins and stones which have all worked well. There are other plants in the garden that I can use for naturally dyeing fabric in my dye pot. Mint, bay and ivy leaves will all yield dye, as will buddleja and forsythia flowers. As well as these, I would like to grow more plants in the garden that I can use for dyeing; perhaps woad, goldenrod and St. John’s Wort, which will all give me beautiful colour on cloth.

I also use the plants in the garden to collect leaves from for eco-printing. Rose, geranium, bamboo and peony leaves have all given me good results. We have a beautiful Japanese acer tree in our front garden whose leaves print very well too. I would like to experiment with cotinus (smoke bush) leaves too. Maybe I could find one on one of my walks or squeeze one into the garden somewhere!

Rust dyeing samples from this summer

I tried rust dyeing for the first time this summer and I’m keen to do some further exploration. I have mixed feelings about the results of this summer’s experiment and, whilst I don’t dislike the fabric I have produced, I do feel that I would like a bit more variation in the colour. I will try a different technique next time and compare the results.

Two techniques that I am keen to have a go at are making plant based inks and making my own drawing tools from foraged materials.

There are some basic vegetable ink recipes in Alice Fox’s book ‘Natural Processes in Textile Art’ which I have mentioned in a previous blog post. I will start with these and see whether I am pleased with the results.

Image courtesy Wilhelm Gunkel at Unsplash

Lorna Crane is an Australian artist who makes her own drawing and painting tools from items she comes across on her walks. This includes driftwood, organic fibres and found items which she then fashions into brushes. Her brushes are beautiful works of art in their own right and she uses them to create interesting marks on both paper and fabric. The nature of her brushes imbues her work with a connection to the earth and her local area. I am inspired to make my own drawing tools and find my own connections with the locality of the materials.