Salmonberry Ecoprint Textile Art - Cedar Dell Forest Series #1
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. The first that I’ve completed is a wall hanging showcasing the beautiful salmonberry plant. This plant has dark pink flowers that bloom in early spring. The leaves have hardly emerged by the time the delicate flowers are in full bloom. After the petals fall to the ground, the many stamens spread into a halo and ultimately form what looks to me like a crown on the top of the bright orange berries. Some of these elements are incorporated into my piece, as well as botanical prints of the leaves.
The backing is cotton, lightly dyed with cochineal, that has some faint leaf prints as it was bundled with a scarf that I ecoprinted. I hand appliqued naturally dyed and ecoprinted silk 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. I usually dye enough to sell some to others and you can see what’s currently available in my shop.
Before I started stitching, I wrote a few sentences about the salmonberry plant and my observation of it in the early spring. These images helped guide my stitching and I hope you can feel the connection to the forest in my work.
“It’s a crisp day in early spring, when the sky is blue and dotted with white clouds but the lingering chill of winter is still in the air. There amidst the brown branches are bright fuschia flowers and the beginning of green butterfly-shaped leaves. The ground below is still bare, though damp from the nearby stream, whose delicate music you can hear and rippling water you can glimpse through the tangle of delicate branches. It’s a promise that a carpet of green will appear soon. Almost before all the leaves have emerged the delicate petals start to drop, littering the ground like confetti, and the inside of the flower widens into a crown that will soon adorn the top of the yellow-gold berries that are to come.”
By the time I took photos of the finished piece, the flowers were almost done blooming, but you can see here the color of the flowers compared to the cochineal-dyed silk fabric and thread that I used. Creating colors to match those in nature is a large part of the fun, and challenge, of working on this series.
