Last of the Coreopsis

I’ve been playing with the last of this season’s coreopsis from my garden. The flowers often print vibrant orange-red, making them a beautiful accent or main feature of some of my favorite eco-printed compositions. Today I printed a couple of natural fiber shirts that I dyed in indigo a couple days ago.

The button-up blouse is linen, while the t-shirt is cotton. In ecoprinting, the colors and shading differ a lot from day to day and season to season, as well as depending on the mordant and fiber used. For comparison, here are some of this season’s paper prints that I made while doing heat press demos during June’s Toe River Arts Studio Tour.

Meanwhile, below is a close up from a linen table runner I printed last year. You can see there is a wide variation in color and how defined the prints end up being.

Part of the joy of this art, for me, is the ever-changing colors and the often unpredictable results. I usually do tests on smaller pieces of fiber before composing a larger piece. That way I get a sense of how the colors will turn out from a specific plant collected using a particular mordant. Even the slightest change in weather or growing season can change the results!

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