COMMUNITY CRAFT · ECO-PRINTING · 2025

Plants & Prints

What can happen when people learn through making together?

Eco-printing workshop · A live museum · Toronto · 10 participants

Plants & Prints began as an eco-printing workshop using plants gathered from the gardens at a live museum in Toronto. I originally designed it as a way to introduce a sustainable textile technique, but the experience became about much more than learning how to transfer colour from plants onto cloth.

Through gathering, making, waiting, talking, and comparing results, I watched relationships develop between participants, materials, memories, and the place around us. The workshop became an opportunity to explore how sustainability might be experienced through making rather than explained only as an idea.

While working as an Education Interpreter at the Village at Black Creek, I researched historical textile practices and developed a public workshop that connected the site’s textile history with contemporary questions around sustainability.

I chose eco-printing because the process makes the relationship between plant and textile immediately visible. Leaves and flowers leave their own colours, shapes, and traces on the cloth through heat and moisture.

But I didn’t want the workshop to begin with a lecture about sustainability. I wanted participants to encounter plants, materials, history, and one another through the experience of making.

The Village at Black Creek wasn’t simply a location for the workshop. It became part of the experience.

Participants arrived surrounded by gardens, heritage buildings, spinning wheels, historical textile practices, and a working Franklin stove. Before we even introduced the materials, they were already encountering a different relationship with how things were grown, made, used, and cared for.

I began to think about the workshop as something that couldn’t be separated from its setting. The garden provided our materials. The historic environment provided context. And moving through the site gave participants another way of thinking about textile practices across time.

Before I explained the technique, I invited participants to talk.

Together, we created a collaborative map around our connections to nature, textiles, clothing, gardening, colour, waste, and sustainability.

What surprised me was how quickly a room of strangers became a group of storytellers. One person’s memory prompted another. Participants discovered shared experiences and brought knowledge into the room that I could never have planned in advance.

The workshop didn’t begin by giving people knowledge. It began by revealing knowledge that was already there.

Rather than preparing all of the dye materials in advance, participants collected flowers and leaves from the Village gardens.

Something changed when we moved outside. People slowed down. They compared colours, shapes, textures, and scents before deciding what to gather.

I had expected this part of the workshop to be mostly about collecting materials. Instead, it became an exercise in paying attention.

Sustainability began to feel less like information and more like learning to notice.

Everyone received the same basic instructions and worked with similar materials, but no two people approached them in quite the same way.

Some carefully planned every leaf and flower. Others worked intuitively and responded to combinations as they appeared.

Watching these differences reminded me that making wasn’t simply the execution of instructions. Participants brought their own memories, preferences, observations, and ways of working into the process.

The goal wasn’t to produce ten identical results. It was to create enough structure for people to experiment and respond to the materials themselves.

Once the bundles went into the steamer, there was nothing more we could do.

We waited.

The colours were developing beyond our control. People talked, observed, asked questions, and wondered what might emerge.

It became one of the quietest parts of the workshop, but also one of the moments I remember most clearly.

Making, I realized, isn’t only about doing. Sometimes it also means waiting, paying attention, and allowing the material to participate in the outcome.

While the prints steamed, participants explored nineteenth-century spinning, weaving, dyeing, and clothing repair at the Village.

The timing created an unexpected connection. While colour was slowly moving from plants into cloth, we were also talking about how textiles had once been produced, repaired, maintained, and valued.

Historical textile practice wasn’t presented as something completely separate from contemporary sustainability. The two conversations began to overlap.

No two prints were the same.

Almost immediately, people began comparing colours and patterns, wondering why one leaf produced a strong print while another barely appeared.

What interested me wasn’t only the results. It was what happened around them. People exchanged observations, asked one another questions, and tried to make sense of the outcomes together.

The conversation became as important as the textiles themselves.

Between leaf and cloth.
Between participant and place.
Between memory and material.

The participants had shared the same workshop, but they hadn’t produced the same experience.

Each person entered with different memories, observations, preferences, and relationships with the materials. The finished textiles carried some of those differences.

Variation is part of the learning itself.