This year I struggled to get my indigo seeds to survive past the sprout stage. I started seeds indoors to get a head start on the season, but my first two attempts died before they were large enough to divide and pot up. I finally managed to have a few seedlings that survived to be planted outdoors in early June. I had 3 clumps of plants, but they did produce a few stems and some leaves. I put them in different locations in the garden, and they slowly grew over the course of the summer.

By mid-September I knew I had to harvest and use them before the plants were killed off by the frost. Since there were not a lot of leaves I decided to hammer the individual leaves onto fabric. I had a couple of plain cotton tea towels and used them as my canvas. There are many different types of leaves that can produce prints like this, I experimented last year with carrot, fig, sage, cosmos, and marigold leaves.

This type of project is pretty simple and doesn’t require any special equipment. I cut the stems and placed them in a cup of water to keep them from curling. I then grabbed a small metal hammer and a large piece of carboard to use as a backing to protect the fabric from my concrete porch.

Once I was ready to begin, I carefully cut the leaves off of the stems so as to not rip and break them. I arranged them in the pattern that I wanted on the tea towel, the first towel has a mirror image, so I laid the leaves on half the towel and folded it over. You do need two pieces of fabric to hammer the leaves between, so you will get 2 prints from each leaf. You can either use the same fabric or use scrap of some sort.

Once I had everything laid out in the way that I wanted, I very carefully folded over the other half of the towel and made sure there weren’t any huge creases. I then very carefully hammered each leaf, the image began to appear immediately. You want to make sure you get the whole outline. The veins are quite visible in some of the prints. Once I finished the whole towel I unfolded it and hung it up to dry. Hammering leaves or flowers is very different from immersion dye in that it does not need to soak or sit for the image or color to transfer. There’s no excess dye to wring out.

This was the result of the mirror image print. One side will always be darker than the other, the one you are hitting directly. The side that rests on the cardboard will be a little less crisp. Some folks use wood as the hitting surface but I’m not sure how that might change the print.

Each leaf print is unique, and I hit some of them better than others. But that’s all part of the fun.

For the remainder of the leaves, I decided to do a spiral shape. I used two towels, instead of mirroring half the image. Here are the finished products hanging up to dry. Once they were dry, I then removed the leafy bits by shaking out the towels.

In total I ended up printing 3 towels from a small harvest of only about 75 useable leaves. Made for a fun afternoon project before the cold weather set in.