DIY: Textile Printing Techniques and Inspiration

Hello, hello! :) Some of you might know that I'm a huuuge fan of easy (textile) printing techniques and this blog post is dedicated to this obsession of mine and is meant to provide you with a few ideas, tricks and inspiration.
Some of the projects shown here are brand new, some others are from my DIY-archives, but will hopefully also be interesting to new and old readers. :)
I love printing on textiles, making stamps out of potatoes or rubbers stamps, this is so nice to make boring surfaces and fabric prettiers. Here we go!
For printing with natural supplies, you will need an apple, a potato and a thin branch with leaves. Moreover, a sponge is also a great tool for printing on textiles.
As you might know, I love making rubber stamps to print on paper, but you can also use them to print on textiles. You need a normal eraser, an ink pad with textile color and a cutter set.
This apple tote is one of my faves:
You simply need to cut an apple into two halves, dry its surface, color it and print onto fabric.
This tote is so bright and makes me happy, I used a potato to create this pattern:
Like you did it with the apple, cut the potato into halves, dry its surface and use a sharp knife to cut it into shape. Paint it with textile color and use it as a stamp.
All following prints were also made using this simple and yet so effective technique:
The black and white arrow tote bag has been made just recently. :)
This baby onesize was a present for a friend who just got a baby daughter.
Aww, I love buntings! This is a rather old design.
 Again, using the same shape for painting the tote, just in another color.
Here I also used a potato as a stamp and carved an anchor into it.
Apart from potatoes and apples, you could also use rubber stamps to print on textiles.
Therefore, you only need a normal eraser and cut your favorite motif into it (full rubber stamp DIY here). Then use an ink pad with textile color instead of a normal ink pad. Using a rubber stamp for textile printing is nice for small, detailed and tiny patterns.
This is my collection of handmade rubber stamps, perfect to print on envelopes, gift tags or fabric for a cute pattern. :)
Another idea would be to use a sponge: this is perfect for huge patterns without too many small details, nice for large-scale prints. Simply cover the sponge in paint and start printing.
In addition to all the stamps, you could simply use textile pens when you are lazy and only need one item to be stamped. :) This is a fast method, but not suitable for making many copies. Then, a stamp would be more effective and save time and effort. :)
One technique I came across about three years ago was using leaves and branches as a stamp.
Therefore, you need to color the surface of the leaves with textile paint, then put it into the fabric, facing it, put a sheet of paper on top and carefully use a paint roll to transfer the color.
Last but not least, a great method for textile printing is using a stencil. Therefore, you need to cut your motif out of cardboard, your motif will then be the negative space. Then you can put the cardboard onto your piece of fabric and paint the space which is left open.

So happy weekend (I'm off to the Blogst conference in Essen, working there for DaWanda and meeting many awesome people (again)) and hopefully you are inspired for some printing session. :)
Lu