I had intended to blog today and share pictures of todays nuno felt scarves but the internet connection has been poor, the weather deteriorated and I didn’t get them photographed so instead I’ll share a couple of pics of my latest eco bundling experiment.

Starting to unroll the silk encased eucalyptus

Thanks to Emma Jane Champley I had a small collection of dried eucalyptus windfalls, I also had some onion skins, tea leaves and cotinus leaves which I had discovered starting to turn colour out in my garden this morning. Yesterday I’d left some silk fabric steeping in a vinegar and water solution so proceeded to create four bundles using  a variety of my raw materials. I steamed these for 30 minutes and then a further 20 minutes in the microwave (it’s 700 watts for anyone who is interested!). Probably I should have let them all sit nicely wrapped up until tomorrow morning but I couldn’t wait so opened two of the pieces late this afternoon. The eucalyptus leaves left a really beautiful print, I just LOVE the effect and now need to get my hand on tonnes of these leaves. If you’re coming to our open evening at Duckett’s Grove on Saturday night for a browse, chat and glass of wine please bring some with you if you have any spare!!! I also liked the soft but subtler effect of the onion skin, cotinus, tea package that I opened up, tomorrow will tell another tale as I’ll open the second batch and see if the prints are stronger.

My intention is to do some more experimentation with this method and incorporate some of these current samples into a larger nuno felt project. To date I’ve also being doing some over printing/dyeing with some of the samples, I also need to try more printing on my hand rolled prefelt and I’d also like to design a larger piece as a stand alone silk hanging! Anyway, if you’d like to see a few more pictures of this latest effort just head on over to Nicola Brown – Clasheen on Facebook.