In my previous 3 posts I shared my adventures in natural dyeing using a book written by Rebecca Desnos. When I ordered that book, I saw she also had edited a zine named, Plant Dye Zine, so I purchased that too. In addition to Rebecca there are 7 other contributors who wrote chapters on their own techniques. The zine includes chapters on botanical inks and paints, printing with plant materials, growing a dye garden and dyeing with plants, and pressing flowers just to name a few of the topics.

Natural fabric dyeing is a very slow process. It takes days to weeks. So I was intrigued by the tutorial “Flower & Leaf Pounding” by Samorn Sanixay. This is a quick and easy process which involves the use of a flat head hammer and is a great activity to do with children. (There are multiple warnings in this zine to make sure that you know your plants and aren’t using anything poisonous)!

I used parsley leaves, marigolds leaves and a “weed” which I think is probably a wild daisy or aster. I used the gold and red leaves to do the pounding on the left and the plain orange marigold leaves to do the pounding on the right. I put a tiny daisy in the center of each cluster of marigold petals. I also used some wild geranium petals but they were too pale pink and all I got was a “ghost” which is just barely visible on the fabric.

As instructed, I folded the fabric in half before pounding, which should give mirror images. I didn’t get good results with my fabric doing that, so I used a piece of cardboard from pad of paper and re-pounded the petals which worked much better.

I liked the flower arrangement on the right and the parsley leaves best on the left.

You can just set the color by ironing the fabric after letting it rest for 24 hours. Samorn also suggests boiling or steaming. I decided to try the boiling method which she said sometimes deepens the green colors. Sadly, that was not the case with my parsley and marigolds. Here’s what happened.

The image on the left is the fabric boiled and dried. The image on the right is after the boiled fabric has been ironed.

The parsley faded and turned light olive green. The red in the marigold leaves on the left flower is mostly lost and the oranges have faded to yellow. However, I still like the flower on the right side.

I did use a piece fabric that had been soaked in soy milk as a mordant that I use for dyeing fabric with plants. The fabrics used in the tutorial hadn’t been pre-treated so my treated fabric probably did effect my results. Nevertheless, I had fun and all is not lost. It was just a scrape of fabric. Right now I don’t think any of the flowers blooming in my garden are good candidates for pounding but I will definitely try this technique again when I have some other flowers in bloom. And next time I’ll just heat set the color with an iron!

I do have to say, this flower and leaf pounding is really a lot of fun!