Printing with Collard Greens

Today I’m talking about printing with collard greens.

For those who don’t know my hubby, he grows all kinds of great veggies for us to eat. One of our favorites is collards. To tell you the truth, until I met Dave fifteen years ago, I never tasted this vegetable. Every year when he brings them in from the garden, I have wanted to steal a couple leaves and print with them. This year I finally did it!!

Here are the collards in the garden. If you are interested in growing collards, or seeing which ones Dave is growing, check out this post.

With Dave’s help I selected three medium-sized leaves of three different varieties. Aren’t they pretty?

As with regular leaf printing, I dabbed textile paints on the back side of the leaf.

That leaf is then placed on the fabric.

To press the leaf into the fabric I placed newspaper over the collard. Using a brayer I rolled over the paper. If you aren’t familiar with leaf printing, check out this post which has a link to a video and instructions.

Lifting up the leaf and like magic, there is the print.

Here are all three different leaves.

Now to get serious. I continued working on that piece and here is the result.

Lastly, I had this green ice dyed piece that was pretty but I thought adding the prints would make it more interesting.

Here is what the leaves looked like at the end of the session before I disposed of them. I didn’t put them on the compost pile due to the paint.

Printing with these leaves is a bit different than regular leaves. Even though collards are pretty sturdy, when you add paint and play with them, they tend to break down. I felt the whole time I was working with them that they were going to fall apart. I also picked medium-sized leaves. I knew the beautiful large leaves would be hard to handle. These were easier, but not as easy as the leaves I usually work with. I’ll definitely try it again.

Last year I didn’t take time to print, but decided I’d preserve some kale leaves to print in the future. They didn’t preserve. Instead they just got more fragile. I would assume that would happen with these too. So it’s now or never when using these leaves.

Thank you to those of you who purchased from my Etsy store. It made my heart happy to send these goodies off to their new homes. The Cyber2020 sale (15% OFF) is on until tomorrow at midnight if you’d like to pick up something for that special someone or you. The indigo bag is sold, but I do have another one back in the shop that I made using similar fabric. The small bag is great for COVID supplies – sanitizer and folded mask.

Also in the shop are some of my cards, and scarves. Talking about indigo dye, also in the shop is this silk indigo dyed Itajime Circle Scarf.

Thanks again for visiting my Etsy shop, and for stopping here to read my blog. I appreciate each and every one of you. Hope you are having a great week.

For some inspiration, I’m linking up to Nina Marie’s Off The Wall Friday.