If you’re into arts or crafts you may have seen videos of people placing coloured leaves or flowers on plain cloth to create vibrant prints that almost look photocopied. It was one such video that led Kalpana Palaniappan, a fashion designer and founder of the label Gaia Studio, to start experimenting with eco-printing. “I was mostly designing sarees with alternative sustainable fabrics made from eucalyptus, rose petals, sugarcane, bamboo, and banana but some of the fabrics couldn’t absorb dark colours making it look very dull. Then I came across a few profiles on Instagram doing natural eco-printing and got interested,” she says, adding that her initial projects featured eco-printed marigold flowers.
Many credit social media for the rising popularity of eco-printing in Bengaluru. “For the last two years, I’ve been getting a lot of queries. People share pictures, videos, and reels of my prints or others’ prints saying that they want to learn this. Even if they don’t have a background in dyeing or textiles, it really catches their eye and shocks people how a leaf can be printed so beautifully on fabric,” says Aditi Singh, an eco-printing workshop facilitator. Closely related to natural dyeing, the key difference of eco-printing is that it retains the plant element’s original beauty. Namrata Bhutoria, the co-founder of ColorAshramFoundation, explains, “It is the process of transferring impression of a leaf or a flower, and along with it, some colour which is present in it onto a fabric with the help of heat and some water. So it’s basically creating a print.”
The ease of the process with not many expensive materials or intensive training, makes it appealing. Apart from this, contemporary artist Tasneem Lohani explains that for her, eco-printing is a way to get in touch with nature, reconnect with the body, and embrace sustainable practices. “With eco-printing, a strong sense of the body is very central to a lot of the processes – I have to wash the cloth, wait for it to dry, or the paint to cure. It requires a certain amount of slowing down, which I found very interesting in a world where we are constantly trying to be more efficient.”
How does it work?
Singh explains the process of eco-printing: washing, mordanting, and printing. “First, we need to wash the fabric with a neutral detergent. Second, mordanting is the most important step which helps to fix or extract the colour. Different mordanting recipes give different results – alum and aluminium acetate are commonly used. You could also boil tannin-rich plants like pomegranate peels, tea, or onion skins in water, soak the fabric, dry it and then use alum and dry again. Finally, we pick the fresh leaves and flowers and lay them onto the fabric, roll the fabric carefully, and then steam it for a couple of hours.”
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“Bengaluru is very interesting because it has a huge variety of trees and plants that give you wonderful colours – you can get great results from the badam tree, eucalyptus, and silver oak,” Lohani shares a tip. adding, “India Flint, an Australian artist who brought eco-printing back into the mainstream shares interesting tips in her books. One of them is to go around with a cup of hot water while looking for plants and put them in your cup. If they immediately start leaving out colour, that means that material will give some kind of dye.”
For those struggling to get colour out of their leaves or petals, Bhutoria suggests ‘eco impression printing’, saying, “We’ve changed the process a bit by adding colours onto the leaves and then taking an impression in which the shape and the texture of the leaf come through. It helps in creating different colours because, in Indian flora and fauna, you don’t get reds and oranges [leaves] like in other countries.”
