Texture of the Week: Honesty Seed Pods

Towards the end of 2023, I started a series of Instagram reels focusing on various stamping or mark-making tools for the gel plate. I released a new reel each Friday for a few months and called it "Found Texture Friday".  

Coming up with new found objects to try on my gel plate is one of my favorite ways to play, so it was an easy and fun part of my process to share with people. At some point, I dropped the ball or maybe felt like I'd run out of ideas, I don't know.

Anyway, I'm going to try to bring it back as a weekly series on my blog and social media, this time calling it "Texture of the Week". For this first week, my found texture is the Honesty plant seed pod.

The coinlike seed pods of this plant, sometimes called the "money plant", split when releasing seeds, leaving a pearly sheath that looks like delicate paper when dried.

My mother gave me a few handfuls months ago, and they've been in my "things to try" pile till now. (I do really have a bin for these items. Once I try an object and determine if it's a keeper, then it goes into one of my other bins, such as "Homemade stamps", "Things that make circles", "Botanicals", etc...) My kids are finally back in school, so I had a little time to play last week. I did a bit of gel printing over the summer, but it was mostly for class ideas or samples. 

One of the wonderful features of botanical textures is that they can often be used as a mask, which creates an outline of the plant shape, but many leaves will also leave behind amazing textures in the "ghost" print. 

These seed pods certainly delivered! I don't often mix botanical textures with other types of textures found around the house or trash bin, but I feel like these would be easier to blend with other non-plant textures. And, I could see the texture from the pods working well with/in my rocks. 

Because the pods are similar to thin paper, I had a really hard time removing them after the initial print, where I used them to mask off a dark blue paint. I ended up pulling out my tweezers to try to get more off, but eventually got frustrated and decided it was "good enough!"

Imagine my surprise and delight when the remaining pods pulled up with the gold paint in my ghost print. And, they were completely stuck to the paper, fully incorporated into the second print. Now that I know this is possible, I won't fuss trying to remove so many with tweezers. 

Because this plant is so fragile, I won't get many prints from my small pile, but that's OK. You can see a quick recap from my printing session in the video below. Enjoy!