Osoberry Ecoprint Textile Art - Cedar Dell Forest Series #2
I’m working on a series of textile pieces that are inspired by some of my favorite plants in the forest surrounding my home and studio at Cedar Dell Forest Farm. This is the second in the series and I was inspired by the osoberry plant (also called Indian plum, Oemleria cerasiformis.) Osoberries are tall shrubs, almost like small, sprawling trees, and when I love about them is that the bright leaves and creamy, white flowers are the first signs of spring to emerge from the winter forest. They often don’t even wait until spring to push forth their leaves, but in late winter, while the rest of the Oregon forest still looks dark and sleeping, they are a bright and cheery sight.
I wanted to convey this contrast of light and dark, with botanical prints of the actual osoberry leaves on some of the panels.
The backing is cotton, dyed gray with some dark ecoprints of leaves. I hand stitched naturally dyed and ecoprinted silk, cotton, and wool felt pieces onto the backing and secured them with a variety of hand stitched patterns. All the stitching was done using silk embroidery floss that I dyed myself using natural dyes. You can read more about my dye process for some of the silk floss here. It is so lovely to stitch with and most colors have some slight variegation that adds a richness to the stitching that commercial colors don’t have. Floss that I used was dyed with dyer’s polypore mushrooms, onion skins, indigo, weld, and combinations of those. (You can see all my naturally dyed silk embroidery floss by clicking here.)
When dyeing fabric for this project, I was inspired by the deep green and brown colors of the winter forest as well as the hint of yellow that the osoberry flowers. Yellow also came to me in the form of the sun shining through the evergreens and lighting upon the osoberry leaves, making them almost look as if they are glowing. I got some of these beautiful colors by dyeing fabric and embroidery floss with onion skins, and then overdyeing some of those with indigo dye to create these deep forest greens. (You can learn how to dye with onion skins in this post!) Ultimately the gold onion skin dyed fabric was not quite right for the final piece and the yellow you see in it is silk dyed with weld. The greens and brown in the piece are onion skin and indigo.
This piece was a delight to stitch and I’m already working on the third in this series. I have a list of about 12 plants that I want to honor through this series. You can see all that I’ve completed here.
