Eco Prints

Hello crafty people!

I hope you've been finding some time to do 

some crafting.

With the leaves all out on the trees and the

flowers in the garden, I decided I wanted to 

do some Eco-printing.

I collected some leaves and flowers and got to work.

I used watercolor paper, sprayed it with a water and alum

mixture, then laid down the leaves and flowers, covered it with

another sheet of watercolor paper, also sprayed with the mixture.

I then sprayed it with water and vinegar.

I have a heat press, so I placed the sheets into the press with

a teflon sheet both under and over the "sandwich" 

and pressed it in the heat press.

For more information on this process

check out Em'splace

on YouTube, she has some very good videos that 

give information on eco-printing and different ways to

do it.

Below are the prints I got from this session,

some I love, some I'm not so crazy about.

It's all about testing different leaves and flowers.

This was done with leaves from a Japanese Red Maple

tree.  Unfortunately, I moved the paper so it got a double print

and looks blurred.

This is the other print from the 'sandwich' above.

These next 2 prints were done with Japanese Red Maple 

leaves, I believe a begonia flower and "whirlybirds" from 

our tree. You can see that the whirlybirds didn't do much for 

the print.  Maybe if they had been plucked from a tree and

still green rather than dried, they would have made a better 

print.

These 2 are the leaves again. 

The "tops" of the leaves leave a beautiful print where

the backs don't have a lot of color.

They will make a nice background for cards

either way.

These two prints were done with some 

begonia and geranium flowers and leaves.

I think I may play around some more with these

flowers and do some more printing.

When doing eco printing, once the flowers and leaves

are pressed you remove them from the paper.

Sometimes they are dried right into the paper,

as some of them are on these prints.

I could wet the entire sheets and soak them off,

but I decided to leave the pieces pressed into 

the paper in some areas.

All in all, I like the prints I ended up with, 

some more than others.  And I had a fun time 

experimenting with different things.

I plan to do more eco printing in the next few 

weeks and months, I just have to find some different

kinds of leaves and flowers to play with.

Thanks for stopping in today to see what I've 

been up to. I hope you might give eco printing a try.

You don't have to have a heat press, there are different ways

to do it, even using a household iron.

I encourage you to check out the link above and

maybe give it a try yourself.

Hope to see you again soon.

Until then:

Try something new and different!