When the snow is deep I work with what I have saved throughout the year. Drying and pressing is great as it doesn't take up space in the freezer and the materials last indefinitely. Not all dried flowers work (the darker the better) but in this case the hollyhocks are great fresh or dry. They got ahead of me last summer so I just picked up all the fallen blooms and left them in a basket to dry. I used them along with dried and pressed leaves on the last of my silk jacquard.
The stuff that looks like ash is the hollyhock, if you just throw them in whole they make kind of a blotch, so I am using them to color the background around the leaves. For these I used several kinds of maple, smoke tree, eucalyptus, onion skins and dogwood.
Rolls, both before and after steaming (the two darker ones are re-dos that went into the pot as well):
Some close ups of the results. I think it is interesting that the hollyhocks came out both a blue purple and a red purple. This probably had to do with the mordant (rusted nails) and how much was distributed on each piece. It could also be that the different leaves affect the color, acting as a co-mordant.
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