Travelling with textiles: Australian bush leaves for dyes

Ecoprinting with Gina in Sydney

Gina Mastio in her garden
in French's Forest, Sydney

Gina Mastio offered to organise a one day course for me and friends during my visit to Sydney last February. I had met Gina in Lauris during an indigo workshop with Michel Garcia and kept in contact with this soft spoken textile artist...

Some of Gina's ecoprint pieces

So she invited us to her workshop perched in her house right in the tall trees in French's Forest. We spent a fantastic day on the decks in the middle of the vegetation!

Gina has a passion for plants and permaculture. So with the help of Olivier, her French husband, she set up garden beds all over the back yard to feed the family and the dyeing pots!

So we started the day with a tour of the garden and picked a selection of plants, like this purple basil which gave us a beautiful violet hue.

Sally with a generous piece of bark!

Lily Rose loves cooking but this time prepares
leaves for the dye pots.

We had collected vegetal material over the days to experiment. Sally brought these pieces of eucalyptus bark amongst lots of other Australian plants from her garden!

We used a wide variety of gum leaves, ferns, bark, nuts, etc. and boiled them in small jars in a bain marie.

With this array of colours on our swatches, we could now figure out which plant to use for our first eco print pieces. We continued our exploration with bundles. We placed leaves on a silk piece then covered it with a wool piece then bundled the lot like a sanddwich around a tube or stick fastening tightly with rope.

We loaded all these sticks in the big pot, some in the dye bath, partly or whole, some just getting the steam and kept the mixture simmering covered for a good hour. Then comes the surprise to see the result of the combination of minimal planning, random and plant colorings... Cinerea eucalyptus leaves give a lovely bright red;