I dyed this fabric last year and it’s one of my favorites. I was really happy with the way I had a viable design without doing anything more to it, but HOW do you design with that? I had a false start last year and am now trying again. These are the collection of “featured”…
I’m currently enrolled in a mini-collage class with Jane Davies. For week one, she had us paint A LOT of swatches. Surprisingly, I didn’t need to buy any paint. I guess I’ve done more of this over the years than I realized. I’m pretty good at mixing colors, but I still gets streaks sometimes. Jane…
I got this far on my current quilt, before I knew it needed something more. Clearly, the white needed some texture. So, I decided to fling some paint onto it! I practiced first on a piece of muslin, then I just went for it. Amazingly, I did this without any fear! I was READY to break…
After working with some beautiful hand-painted fabrics recently, I decided to try my hand at creating some of my own. Although I had painted fabric before, I had never done so with a really specific purpose. This time I wanted to: – Paint at least 2 large pieces of fabric that would coordinate, – Paint…
Well, here it is, version two now complete: Mid-October. After completely finishing AND photographing version one, I began to think it was too dark. It just didn’t remind me of the bright fall colors I was going for. See what I mean? (Actually, the two quilts photographed slightly differently, but I think you can see the…
In Part One I showed you how to mark large irregular circle shapes. Now, let’s learn how to make smaller flowers. I did this sample on a t-shirt and I wanted the design to be on the front only. Therefore, I put a baking sheet inside the shirt. Draw 5 small dots with a Sharpie….
While at the retreat, I attended a demo about dying fabric with Sharpies (permanent markers) and rubbing alcohol (isopropyl.) I already knew alcohol would make Sharpies bleed, but I’d never seen this particular application. This is the sort of result you can expect. Cool, right? And this is how you do it: – Stretch fabric…
When quilting my latest piece I decided to mimic the swirls/curves in the background. In addition to machine quilting, I also added some hand stitching around several of the curved shapes. My main reason for doing so was to add contrast to the white curves in the light areas. I intended to stitch around all the…
I recently added paint to a quilt! Gulp! This is something I’ve only done once or twice, so I definitely had to get my courage up. It helped that I had done a bunch of painted exercises a few months ago. So, I did some practice samples, held my mouth just right and gave it a…
A few months ago I was playing around with paint quite a bit and using a lot of palette paper. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s sorta waxy, so it can handle a lot of moisture. Often, the paint dried in interesting ways, so I decided to save the papers. (Yep, I did it again:…