Eco-printing
This short video provides an overview of the eco-printing process. When you've finished watching, you can scroll down to have a closer look at what we made and how we made them!
Designing our Eco-prints
We each had a rectangular piece of fabric dipped in iron sulphate. There were loads of different native plants and leaves to choose from.
We chose some of the plants and leaves and laid them out in a unique pattern on our dye blanket.
Once we were happy with the design, a piece of handmade Japanese bamboo paper was laid down on top, and then it was rolled around a wooden baton. We used rubber bands to keep everything secure and put the roll into a pot of boiling rainwater with meadowsweet in it for about 45 minutes.
While we waited for the dye to develop, we started to make ink from elderberries and heather. We talked about the Book of Kells, St Colmcille, and how the monks made ink from oak trees.
To make our natural ink, we crushed elderberries in a pestle & mortar, pulled the flowers from the heather, and added rainwater.
We heated them in separate pots to extract dye and left them to cool & reduce over the coming weeks.
You can see photos of us designing our eco-prints here (click on the carousel to change the image)...
When the eco-prints came out of the pot, of course they were rather wet! They were air dried over a few days before we could do anything with them, but even at this stage they looked really impressive.
We wanted to use them to make a cover for a diary in which we could record our thoughts and feelings about the art project, as well as our research about Antarctica, Shackleton, and Kilkea Castle...
The finished product!
We had to make the diaries by hand, and only used half of our eco-print. The other half was kept safe for display.
First, we folded the paper using bone folders (they're not made from actual bone nowadays). They're tools to crease and smooth paper when perfect lines are needed. Then we measured four points for holes so all the pages would line up with the cover. Book binding is hard!
Once everything was completed, we waxed the outside of the book covers. We learned about different types of paper, particularly Japanese masa paper and recycled paper.
