DIY leaf printed fabric

After the heavy rainfall of last week ( which created a temporary rivier in front of the house), the plants and trees in our garden are growing with such an astonishing speed, that I almost suspect that Hagrid has been toying around with them. So of course; what else could I do but giving today's blog post a botanic twist?

I really love the recent (well, kind of recent) botanic trend, but rather than hopping off to the nearest interior shop and buy the same botanic inspired that everyone else buys, I decided to make my own version of it, by printing fabric with leafs!  And guess what; it's really simple, and gives an awesome result! So why don't you give it a try as well?

oh my, I'm really bad at photographing all needed ingredients...

• some fabric ( cotton works best). 
• a leaf! I used rowan leaf. It might be a good idea to pick several, in case you break one.
• fabric paint 
• a brush
•  a small, glossy piece of carton to place your leaf on. (not pictured)
• a glue stick(not pictured)
• optional: varnish ( I only needed it because I covered a notebook with the fabric)

1. So, I began by picking some leafs from the garden, which was also the hardest step in the whole process, since it has been raining cats,dogs, mini ponies and the occasional teacup-pig for the last few days. Luckily, there was a rowan tree only 3 meters away from the backdoor, so I sort of swam towards that tree, and grabbed the nearest leafs before watersliding back inside.  But sure, you can take any leaf you like, as long as it has some structure to it, and is not too weak!

2. I then took some fabric paint, and started painting the underside of the leaf ( it has more structure to it)

easy does it!

3. Now, in order to print the leaf onto the fabric I needed something to attach the leaf to ( just pressing it with my fingers to the fabric would surely result in a big mess, I figured) So, I took a glossy piece of carton ( a color sample for paint) and added a little bit of glue stick to it. Enough to get the leaf to stick to it, but little enough to pull the leaf of whenever I needed to add extra paint to the leaf.

4. Then I pressed it to the fabric.

Voila!

Whoop whoop, looking good!!

5. So I added more and more prints to the fabric.

hello, improv stamp!

6. whenever the stamp ran out of paint ( which was every 2 or 3 prints) I gently pulled the leaf from the carton, gave it a new layer of paint, and pressed in onto the carton again.

Because the carton is glossy, the glue doesn't dry out very quickly
and makes the leave detachable and reattachable, sweet!

things were beginning to look pretty nifty!

pretty chic, huh? If you're a bigger perfectionist than I am,
you might want to measure the space between the leafs, I just eyeballed it. 

Now that I had a pretty nice piece of fabric, I needed to decide what to do with it. It was too small to sew anything substantial from, so I had to think of something else. hmmm....

Luckily I had an ugly notebook lying around that could use a pretty new cover!

covering the notebook with glue stick...

folding the fabric around it.. 

folder the edges over and covering the raw edges with a sheet of paper
( first page of the book usually does the trick!)

and tucking in the edges of the spine!

Done!!

The last thing I did was covering the notebook with varnish, to prevent the thing from becoming dirty within a few days ( there are things residing in my bag that I rather not speak of...)

wssshhhh

And here's the finished result:

I LOVE that monochromatic print. 

hope you liked it! please let me know about your own results, questions, or epic fails! I'd love to hear about them :)