Fabric Painting (Part Two)

The book Sky Dyes (Mickey Lawler) was the starting point for me as we began to paint fabric. Her first "recipe" was for a soft blue summer sky filled with white wispy clouds. I took my spray bottle and lightly misted the fabric and then mixed up my blues - a little Cobalt and a little ultramarine with a little water. I didn't really use enough water as my skies turned quite a bit darker than I intended. (See samples 1 and 2 in the photo!) Because the first sample was so dark, I added some $dollar store stars, but the wind blew them off, so the effect is not quite as sharp as it could be. I also added some opaque pearlescent pearl on sample 2 for the clouds and it gave a cool sparkly effect.
 Sample 3 was supposed to be a sunrise sky. The colours turned out ok and I sprinkled this sample with coarse salt before letting it dry.
Fabric printing with Knex
The fourth sample was mostly to see the effect of sunprinting - putting something on top of the fabric in the sun to make a print. The Knex pieces were heavy enough that they didn't blow away or move with the wind and made great prints.
Fabric printing with doilies
I've had this little doilies in my craft cupboard forever and thought they might make some cool prints - you can see a bit of an outline just to the left of the doilies to show the print they made. Wasn't quite as effective as I had hoped, maybe paper doilies would work better.
Fabric printing with leaves
These leaf prints turned out just fine, too bad the black didn't mix in very thoroughly with the green as it left some weird looking black spots on the fabric.

I really liked the effect of the salt on the painted fabric and made a couple pieces just to see what it did with the different colours.
Sky colours with salt sprinkled on
Sunset colours with salt effects
I think the wind blowing may have affected the salt effects as they did not look the same as the book samples.

There will be one more post with these fabrics and then I'll have to make something out of them.

--Ann

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pink Chevron Quilt Tutorial

Image
This is a little quilt I made for my newest grandbaby and I promised a tutorial for all of you. Materials required: 50 pink charm squares (5") 50 white or cream charm squares (5") Batting Backing Binding - approximately 170" length (Here's a great place to get your charms - SewFunQuilts on Etsy - $6.85 US for a pack of 30 squares) I used a fat eighth pack of 12 different pink fabrics and a piece of pink from my stash. It was enough for the 50 charm squares and the binding. A fat eighth is 9"x22" and you can get four 5" squares and one 2.25" binding strip from each with a 2" - 2.25" strip left over. Match each pink charm square with a white charm square. Draw a diagonal line through the center and sew a quarter inch seam on either side of your drawn line. Cut apart on your drawn line and press towards the pink fabric. Take all your pink/white squares and lay them out in a chevron pattern. There will be no need to trim to si
Read more

Blue Jean Quilt

Image
Pinterest is a great place for inspiration and I saw this quilt and quickly pinned it, knowing I would be back to make it. The pattern is found in Fons and Porter's Easy Quilts, Spring 2014 edition. Last week, I checked the magazines when I bought my groceries and bought the magazine. I think I could have figured it out on my own, but it's always nice to have a new magazine or two to browse through! I traced the circle template onto some template plastic that I've had for a very long time and dug my stack of old jeans out of the back of the closet. I found a video to play in the background while I traced and cut and in a few hours, I had 168 circles cut from my stack of blue jeans.  The thing that caught my eye about this particular jean quilt was the bright colored fabrics that were peeking out from between the blue jean circles. I have a lot of fat quarters and fabric scraps, but I also had 4 packs of charm squares from Moda's Basic Grey collectio
Read more

Family Tree Quilt

Image
Recently I completed a family tree quilt. This was a challenge for me, not just to put it together, but to use the ideas and feedback from my customer and adapt the design to the size of the embroidery.  The details were fused on with Steam a Seam and then button hole stitched. The customer found some butterfly fabric she really loved and it is used as the border. Family Tree Quilt It is quilted with an all-over butterfly pattern that reflects the butterflies in the border. --Ann
Read more