 Hey guys, sorry about the weird camera angle. Hang on. I think that's slightly better. Anyway, I got asked quite a few times last night after I posted to social media creating these eco prints. I've actually done this process before in one of the moving diaries of vlogs. I will link the particular vlog in the description below. And I referenced in that vlog that I watched a video on how to do this. And her video is linked in the description. I'll give you, I do recommend you go watch it, but I will tell you what I am doing and how I got this. So in our neighborhood, we have a few neighbors who have these bright pink blooms. I don't know what kind of flower these are. If you know, let me know. I have no idea. I'll put a picture of the bush like right about here somewhere. So I have started taking a Ziploc bag with me when we go walking and I fill it up, stick it in the fridge for a day or two, and then I make eco prints with it. So I have three bottles here. One is coffee and water. One is alum and water, powdered alum, which you can get in the spice section of the grocery store. I'll get my can in just a second. And then this one is white vinegar and water. I spray, let me lift this up. I spray the bottom layer of muslin. This is just cotton muslin with all three of these. I lay some flowers face down, spray the flowers, get another piece of muslin, spray the muslin with all three of these, lay it, spray side down on the flowers. I have a board here, a pressing board. This is a Teflon pressing sheet, and then I have another pressing sheet. And then I use a really big iron to just press the flowers into the fabric. This is the powdered alum. I just picked it up at the spice section of my local Fred Meyer. They're owned by Kroger, just FYI, so if you have a Kroger near you. So yeah, you can find it in the spice department. If I'm not mistaken, the alum helps set the dye from the foliage, flowers, nature items. The vinegar helps release the dye and the coffee just adds extra light distress. I think, I'm no expert, so I could be completely wrong on all of those, but I think if I remember correctly, I haven't watched her video in a long time and I haven't really watched it, but I think that's what it is. Not sure again. So somebody correct me if I'm wrong, put something in the comments below. Okay, now you can do this with a household iron, and I think in her original video, she does do that in my original video I do too, but after I filmed the original video, I saved up a little money and I got myself one of these big cricket press things. I don't remember what it's called. I'll link it though below. I think I did get it on Amazon and it is much easier with this. You don't have to have it, but you can. The nice thing about this is it has a temperature setting and a timer and literally, you have it set at 335 degrees for 30 seconds. So literally the first time I push down, which crushes the flowers into the fabric from both directions because I have the board under there. My pieces of fabric are about, I don't know, nine by 12-ish, eight and a half by 11-ish, and I've got two to four flowers. Okay, so then when the timer goes off, I move it, set it again. You'll notice I also have this blue absorbent chamois thing underneath because it does get kind of wet and drippy and I don't want the water to go anywhere, everywhere. I want it to try to contain the mess. But you're heating up the wet foliage and crushing it and releasing the dye from the flowers into the fabric. And I do this about, I don't know, eight or 10 times per set of flowers in fabric. So I'm going to do that and I'll be back. Okay, once I do that a few times on one side, then I try to carefully, without splattering the hot liquid all over myself, to flip it over. And this is why you have the absorbent cloth or a rag or something on there. Okay, and then we're going to do the other side. Okay, so personally, when I do this, one of the reasons I add the coffee is I like to do it until we get some of this brown staining along with the pink. I find that more interesting. Once I have that on one or both sides, then I'm happy. So I'm going to flip it over now and try to get that on the other side. I'm going to actually put some paper in here to absorb some of that. I'll just use cheap drawing paper from the dollar store. I usually have a big stash of it. Now we're going to do the other side and hope that we can get some of that brown staining on the other side. Okay, this is what I'm talking about. I love the way this is looking. I love the staining that's going on with a bit of brown. I love that. So I, and I found that you don't get this brown staining without adding the coffee, whether it's a burning issue that goes on because of the coffee or it's just staining because of the coffee pool. I don't know. But if you don't add the coffee, I, when I'm doing this, I don't get that. So that's why I add the coffee. It's still really, really wet. And although I can keep going and drying it with the iron, it's better if I let it sit for a bit and drip off. So I'm going to take it with the paper that's on the bottom, transfer it to this cookie sheet with a rack on it. These are all from the dollar store. I'm going to put it on a drying rack and set it aside. And we're going to do it again. So I'm going to take another piece of fabric, spray it with the vinegar and water, spray it with the almond water, spray it with coffee and water, put some flowers, creatures, smush the creatures, spray the flower tops, grab another piece of fabric, spray it, turn it over, put this on top and do it all over again. I'll be back. Okay. Now to clean your Teflon pressing sheets. You don't have to clean them. If you're just going to use it for ego dying, you might want to just leave them dirty. I use them for all kinds of things. So the best thing to do is use some iron off, which is meant for cleaning the bottoms of your non-stick irons and getting crud off. And then I get a green scrubby sponge. And it just comes right off. This is a non-stick sheet. So first of all, it's not going to really stick very well. And if you get any of the staining on the bottom of your iron, it will also get it off the iron. It's best to do while the iron is still warm. Of course, using old caution, follow the directions on the iron off. You can get the iron off at your local fabric shops. Probably any place that sells sewing notions and tools probably has it. Right now, of course, you're going to have to go to Amazon or someplace else online to get it. I always have some around. So then I'm going to just take some water and a rag and write the residue off. Look at that. And then all of the rags and everything just go in the laundry. While I'm doing this, my fabric is sort of dripping off and drying a little bit. I'm not going to let it dry completely before I'm going to get in there and separate the sheets. See, there you go. It's not perfectly clean, but it's more clean. I'm not going to let it dry completely before I get in there and separate the sheets and take the organic matter out. The flowers and finish drying off the fabric with the iron. I'm going to show you what the results of those are in a minute. I'm going to finish cleaning my sheets. I have a few leftover flowers, so I have an idea for that. So we're going to take care of that too. I'll be right back there. These are two cookie sheets sandwiched together with some weights on top. Yesterday, I haven't peeked at this. This is the first time I'm looking at this. So yesterday when I was done, things were still damp, but almost dry. I was pulling all the fabric apart, pulling the flowers out and putting them between more of the drawing paper. Some of the paper that I had put under the fabric, like you saw me just do, I used that as one sheet and then put the flowers down and then put a clean sheet on top of it, then put some more flowers and put another sheet. You get the idea. I did a big like sort of flower paper sandwich. I sandwiched it between two cookie sheets and then just let it dry overnight. So ooh, it's still a little wet. Look at that. So I'm going to throw the flowers actually in the Ziploc bag because I actually have an idea and I don't know that these flowers are going to help at all, but they're still damp actually. So you can get some interesting eco-printed paper too out of this if you do it right. This is one of the sheets I used as a blotter sheet, like I showed you earlier underneath the fabric and then I put it in here with more flowers. That one's cool. So you can do that with the sheets. Also, I'll be saving these two cookie sheets because when we take the other fabric apart to dry it, I'll be doing the same thing. These are pretty cool. All right, so now while the fabric is drying a little bit and getting a little less damp, I'm going to take my bag of flowers that I have left and a pot that I have up here that I got from the thrift shop a long time ago with the intention of doing this. Don't do this in your kitchen pot. Get a just thrift store $2 pot to do this, okay? So I'm going to meet you in the kitchen and I'll be right back. Okay, we're downstairs in my kitchen and before I get started with what we're going to do here, I need to do the breakfast dishes. So let me get that done. Okay, I need to run the dishwasher, but first we're going to get this going. So I have a pot, a strainer, and a spoon. These are all used for art projects only. These are not things used ever for food. Do not do that. Have special things you've set aside. You've maybe picked up the thrift shop that you never, ever, ever, ever, ever cook food in it. So I'm going to put that again. So do not use any implements you cook food in for doing something like this. It's a super bad idea. Okay. So this is disclaimers and warnings. Okay, so we're going to take all of our leftover flowers and the ones that were sort of still moist from the paper. I'm going to dump them in the pot. I don't know for sure what's going to happen, but I've done this with other stuff before. Like avocado seeds and skins, onions. We're going to see if it'll make some ink. It did stir pretty bright fuchsia-y purple-y color in the fabric. I'm kind of wondering what it would do if we boil the flowers, which is what we're going to do. So I've got a lot of windows open to mitigate the fumes. Any fumes that might happen, I'm going to cover the flowers with water, and I'm going to let them boil for at least 30 minutes and I will be back. So I wanted to show you all that it's really coming along nicely. It's been about 30 minutes. You can see, if I push the flowers aside, how pink the water is getting, which is perfect. I'm not going to take the flowers out, but I am going to set it on a low and slow boil for another 30 minutes or so. I really want it to evaporate some of the water. You can hear I have the vent fan on. Of course, I've got all the windows open and stuff like that. I may end up boiling it for a couple hours to really evaporate some of the water. We'll see what happens. I will let you know. I'll be back. Okay guys, so now it's been a little bit. I ate some lunch, got the flowers boiling downstairs. I'm going to plug the iron back in. Our paper and fabric, while still damp, is not completely stopping wet anymore. So we're going to start pulling it apart and setting up things to do some more eco-dyed paper. So I'm going to show you that whole process. We're also at the same time going to dry the fabric by ironing it flat. So I'm going to show you that whole process. I'm going to speed through it and I'll be right back. Okay, I'm not sure you could see what I did here because I think I was slightly off-camera. But I have two cookie sheets here. Let me see if I can lift this up without anything sticking. Okay. And as I was pulling the fabric and flowers apart, I took the paper that was sandwiched with the flowers and fabric and put it on the bottom. Then I put the still damp flowers. Can you see that on that paper? Fresh piece of paper, more still damp flowers, more paper that was already under the fabric, more still damp flowers, fresh piece of paper. And I just did a sandwich, paper flower sandwich. Flowers are still damp. I didn't spray it with anything. Put another cookie sheet on top. They're the same size. They're a little warped. They're from the dollar store. Some weights. And I'm just going to leave this overnight. That's what I did before. I did it before we got these sort of bonus papers. And these were with just a few flowers. I didn't have as many flowers as I had this time because I wasn't sure it was going to work. And this time, obviously, it did work. So I went and got a bunch more flowers. These are the fabrics. You could use either side for journal making, slow stitching, a lot of different things. I love this right here. So between yesterday and today, these are all the fabrics that I've done. And I've got the ink boiling downstairs. Pretty cool, huh? So now I have a nice selection of fabric. I'm hoping the ink turns out. So we'll see what happens. And I will be right back with that and show you how I finish up that. Oh, I will say one more thing. If when you're done, you have some schmutz on the bottom of your iron, while your iron is still warm after you've turned it off, use some of the iron off and a nice thick rag. Follow the instructions and it'll take all of this off. I'm going to do that right now. Okay, we're going to let it cool because it's really hot right now. And then we're going to strain off the flowers and put all of the liquid or homemade dye into this plastic container once it's cool. And it is a pretty sort of pink, light pink color at the moment. We'll see what it looks like when it's cool. I'm going to let the flowers steep in there while it is cooling. So in the meantime, I'm going to go feed my sourdough starter. So all right, I'll be back. Okay, I did finally google it and I was right. So alum is a fixative to fix the dye and make it permanent. Distilled white vinegar can do similar things. And also, in my opinion, helps bring the color out. Now, while I didn't put these in when I was boiling the flowers, I probably could have put one of them in. I wouldn't necessarily put both because I don't know what that would do together. You shouldn't really mix vinegar with too many things because you don't want to create something toxic. But that being said, I'm going to add a little bit of alum to the dye now that it's been created. That's going to take way too long. Let's try the other side. Oh yeah. And I will put a little bit of vinegar. I wouldn't do this over the stove and cook it because I think that's probably a bad idea. Just a little bit. I would normally put glycerin in here too, but I do not know where my glycerin is. And yeah. So the glycerin acts as a preservative and helps keep it from getting moldy and evaporating. See, that's why you should have a bag. So good thing this is the art room ironing board. So the glycerin helps keep it from getting moldy and helps keep it from evaporating. So I usually add glycerin to all of my homemade inks. That being said, I can't find mine. And I don't know where it is. Obviously, this isn't airtight because it's leaking. But I'm just reusing an old jar what I had. I'll transfer it into something else later. But in the meantime, it made a really pretty, look at that, look at that. Really pretty red color and I love the way the fabric turned out. So anyway, I hope this has given you some ideas of what you can do. I will be letting this cool off some more adding glycerin to it and putting it into a different container more than likely. As soon as I can find one. After I get everything added and stirred in. All right, that's it for now. I hope I give you some ideas of some things you can do and experiment with while you're stuck at home. Please use all precautions and heed all of my safety warnings. Don't take any unnecessary chances with your health or anyone else's for the sake of art. It's not worth it. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe if you will. Leave any questions, comments, or concerns down below or over in one of my Facebook art groups, both of which should be linked in the description below. Let's start a conversation. What's your favorite way to eco-die? Do you have some other way I could do it that would work better? Let me know. I'd love to find out. And yeah, let's have a, let's have a conversation. Don't forget to check out the video description for all relevant links, along with ways to support the free content here on Facebook. I'm sorry, here on YouTube and over in the Facebook art groups, not only for myself, but for all of your favorite creatives, they always usually have a way to support them, whether it's an Etsy store, an Amazon affiliate link, a PayPal tip jar, or something, myself included, Patreon or something. So check it out and see what they have. And I understand money is tight for a lot of us right now, but if you have a little way to support the free content, we all sure would appreciate that. So give it a try. And above all, stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative and go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. And I'll see you later. Bye, guys.