Botanical Printing on ITV This Morning with Banjo Beale
Earlier this Autumn I was invited to the ITV This Morning Woodland set to share my love of Botanical Monoprinting with award winning designer Banjo Beale.
The brief was to show Banjo how to print from Nature onto paper menus and fabric napkins and I couldn’t think of a better plant to choose than our native Bracken which grows in abundance in the woods around here and prints well onto both surfaces.
We used my favourite Cranfield Safewash Inks to ink up the bracken - using the back of the fern (which is more textured) for the paper menus and the front (flatter)side of the fern for the fabric.
A little technical note when printing onto fabric : because the surface of fabric is already textured, you’ll need a lot more ink and will get a better effect by inking the flatter side of the fern. You’ll also need to apply as much pressure as possible when burnishing your print. Once the ink on your print has dried completely, put the fabric in the wash at 30 degrees (40 degrees max) to fix the final print.
Did you know that ferns are one of the oldest living species of plants? They are an ancient plant Ancestor - dating back 350 million years when they first emerged from the sea and started to grow on land. Not only were they one of the first plants to emerge, when they did they created oxygen which enabled more plants to grow.
If you’d like to learn more about Botanical Mono-printing, check out my Botanical Monoprinting online tutorial here which comes with an optional starter kit of materials with everything you need to print at home.
You can also pick up one of my hand-made prints in a new section of our web-shop soon!
