I opened the leaf print bundles yesterday afternoon. This is the sunflower prints on a silk/wool blend scarf.

 You can see that I did get a bit of color from the leaf but it wasn’t as strong as I had hoped. I think I should have kept the bundles wet. They sat outside but had dried out.

 Here’s another area of the scarf. It just looks dirty in some places.

 Here’s the lupines on the felted scarf. You can see I got good transfer from the string that had dye in it. The strings are all white now.

 Here are the leaf prints. Very light and hard to see.

 Here are the two scarfs from a distance. Not too impressive.

 Here’s the sunflower scarf after ironing. I’m not sure where those white dots came from. Something blocked the dye there.

 Here’s the end with the blue from the strings. It is the most interesting part of the scarf.

Here’s the lupine one after ironing. I think I need to add another layer on these as I’m not really happy with how they turned out. I’ll leave them for a bit and then decide what to do. Any suggestions?

 This is what the bundles looked like last week right after they were steamed. They’ve been sitting outside on the bench all week. It has gotten below freezing several times so they are getting both the hot and cold techniques. It’s kind of like Christmas as a kid and all those tantalizing packages were under the tree. You want to sneak down late at night when everyone else is asleep and open all your packages to see what’s inside. Did you ever do that? It’s been so tempting to peak and unroll these bundles.

Here they are after one week. I’m not sure they’ve changed much. The one on the right certainly looks more promising. Another week to go. I’m not sure I can stand it.

 I got the book Eco Colour by India Flint recently. So today when I was cleaning out the planting beds for winter, I gathered a bunch of leaves to try a little printing with leaves and steam. This is lupine leaves on a merino felted scarf.

 Here is the bundle all rolled up on a stick. Then you wrap the bundle tightly with string.

 Here is the second scarf. This is one I got from Dharma Trading that is a silk and wool blend. I covered the scarf with sunflower petals and leaves. I did not use any type of mordant with these just to see how they would work without anything extra. I did wet the scarves down first.

 Here it is all rolled up and wrapped with string. I didn’t think very clearly with the string because it has been used before for shibori dyeing and it had blue dye in the string. We’ll see the effect of that later, I’m sure.

 Here are the bundles steaming on the stove top. I think I will definitely have to cut the sticks a little shorter if I am going to be doing much of this type of dyeing. We’ll see how it comes out.

Here are the bundles after steaming for two hours. The one on the left is the lupine leaves and felted scarf. There is transfer of the blue dye for sure. The one on the right looks more promising and is the sunflower one. Now the really hard part. I have to wait to open these for a couple of weeks. I put them outside so hopefully I will forget about them and not try and peak too early in the process. I will post the results when I just can’t stand waiting any longer.