Eco-printing

Eco-printing involves bundling plant material inside fabric and subjecting it to steaming or boiling. The natural dyes from the plants release onto the fabric, leaving behind beautifully imprinted shapes. No two pieces ever look alike; the result is shaped by the season, the plant, the water, the heat.

The colours obtained vary depending on the changing seasons and the plant material used. This unpredictability is the point. Eco-printing is as close to a collaboration with nature as textile-making gets.

What you control and what you do not

The placing is the decision. Where each leaf sits, which way up, how tight the roll is: that is the part of this that is design. After the bundle is tied and goes into the pot, the process takes over and you find out what you made when you open it.

Colour is rarely what the leaf looked like. Green goes in and something else comes out. The same plant will not repeat itself either. What a leaf gives in one season is different from what it gives in another, so a print that came out well in one month may come out as something quite different when it is tried again.

Which means every piece is one of a kind, in the plain sense that the method cannot repeat itself. Each bundle gets unrolled, looked at, and either it worked or it did not.

Ours is done in Mumbai, one bundle at a time.