Hammer Printing Fresh Leaves onto Cloth

Putting a bit of plant material inside a folded calico cloth, then walloping it with a hammer, creates results surprising to those of us accustomed to simmering up plants to make a dye bath. The colour that mordanted wool takes up from a prolonged warming in a plant dye bath rarely corresponds to the original plant colour - for example, weld leaves turn wool acid yellow and acorns give pinkish shades.  After a brief hammering on a hard surface,

once the flattened plants have been scraped and peeled off the cloth, their colour seems to transfer direct.  In this trial, a bluebell and some violas printed blues, celandine flowers yellow and leaves printed green.  The more juicy and fat the plant, the more colour appeared on the cloth, a thick leaf print being a solid deep green shape, while a thinner, dryer leaf had detailed tracery, but released too little sap 

to create a clear image.  The bluebell was so squashy as to lose all definition and the hawthorn leaves were so young and fragile that parts of them got mashed into the thick weave of the calico, impossible to remove.

Trying to find a balance of detail and substance in a hammer plant print, my most pleasing results came from young leaves, freshly grown this May on deciduous trees. The next photo shows an 

apple leaf and a plum leaf.  The stronger prints on the left are on the cloths which were under the back of the leaves, the patchier, paler prints on the right are on the cloths on the top surface.  A similar effect occurs when you print from leaves by simmering them wrapped in an ecobundle with iron - the reverse of the leaf gives a much clearer print.

While hammering is wearisome and noisy, the results are

gratifyingly quick, compared to other methods of plant dyeing. Here is a close up, showing my record of the best kinds of leaves I tried this spring. Pretty as the effect is, the printed cloth can't be washed and a small trial last year suggested that all the printed colours will eventually

turn brown. Thinking there must be some use for hammer prints, I sewed the calico onto cards, using scraps of plant dyed silk to look like spring blossom. When the leaf prints turn brown, they will, after all, still be leaf prints, evolving all by themselves.