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How is this for the background for a day of painting? Right on the Erie Canal in western Upstate NY.
What a lovely day and nice group of ladies to play with!
I was able (to my surprise) to share some techniques that they hadn't used before which were pretty simple but were because of my long time ago experience with painting with acrylics on fabric. I don't think I even have much on my blog about painting with acrylics and I have had the blog for ten years now! So it was a re-introduction to me and also was a little tricky as I hadn't used the type of paints that I used yesterday. All this was complicated by the fact that I had left most of my paints (I thought) down in NC. I found a bin full of paints though, a lot of which were dried out, they were so old. They were full bodied paints or paint concentrates and acrylic extender. Fortunately I still had some textile medium as well.
This is Stephanie giving me a hard time but I caught her after she started laughing at her antics. If you look closely at the piece she is working on, you will see a piece of polyester fleece underneath it. This is perhaps my best contribution to painting on fabric with acrylics. I discovered I didn't like the kind of plastic-y feel that the fabric had when left to dry on a piece of plastic (how I was taught). I tried putting another piece of fabric behind it but if it wasn't ironed, it left marks on the fabric above too. So I finally settled on poly fleece -- no wrinkles and easily washed and wicks just enough of the paint away. I especially used it when I was doing the dyed fabrics where I wanted the salt effects.
This is one of Stephanie's fabrics where she painted with greatly diluted acrylics and then put sea salt on top and set it out to dry. It will be even more gorgeous after she irons it. It is amazing how ironing changes the look of these painted pieces. I don't know which paints she was using as we had quite a variety to choose from.
I think this is one of Sue's but maybe wrong there. She was using a lot of white on white fabrics and the effects on several were stunning. It was tough to take pictures as the wind was blowing the pieces all over the lawn!
This is one of Janet's that I just loved!
A technique that I demonstrated was a monoprint technique using "fun foam", something many of the fusible things at Joanns are made from. Basically the fun foam is glued to a piece of plexiglass and then you paint it and then use it as a stamp. I learned this technique using dyes in a class with Ann Johnston. We did a lot more mark making on the stamps in her class. I was using full bodied Golden acrylics here which did not want to dissolve more in the water so it was a bit difficult. I generally use the Golden Fluid acrylics when doing marbling and "water color" techniques with paints. I have quite a large selection of these full bodied acrylics so will have to figure out something!!
The next three were done by applying the paints over a dampened piece of fabric (I used the cheapest of the Joann's cottons here as I had a whole bolt). I then just randomly added colors in kind of stripes across the fabric. Then I accordion folded it and added a pearlescent paint to the edge. These were not as successful as pieces I have done in the past but are okay.
Again I was using the full bodied acrylics and trying to water them down enough. I also added a goodly amount of textile medium to each of the colors (I only used primaries except for one purple). A few of the pieces of salt we were using obviously landed on some of these pieces as they were lying folded up on their edge. That accounts for the whitish spots.
This was a piece that I had just painted and happened to take a picture of while it was sitting there. After I got it home, I decided that it could use a little salt treatment so I spread some sea salt on it and spritzed it with water hoping the colors would move a bit. All of these six pieces were done with dampened fabric by the way.
This is what the piece looked like after it dried (overnight a part of the next day) and was ironed. Think there was almost too much movement!!
The salt was applied here right after I painted it.
This was probably my favorite for the day. I think these will all turn into cosmetic bags. The surprising things were that the hand of the fabric was stiff but not intolerable and the backs were almost identical to the fronts which really surprised me.
This is a closeup of one of the stamps on the monoprinted piece. I just globbed a paintbrush end to add the little bit of pattern on top of the monoprint.
I can't believe I forgot to take my camera to RAFA this month!! So all these pictures are from my phone which is okay but not great in this lower light. This is a quilt by Beth K.
This quilt was done by Marcia B and uses a variety of silk fusion or silk paper fabrics that Marcia created. Wonderful texture -- inspires me to do some more of that as I have the ingredients as I did this many years ago.
This is one of several pieces that Regina created at QBL this year.
One of the projects that the group was undertaking was the making of houses to be exhibited at the Global Murmurs exhibition. This was one of the two houses that Maryanne created.
This is the pattern that Julie had shared with us and told us to embellish freely. The base for it is Timtex -- a stiff interfacing.
Maryanne overachieved and this was her own design for a house!
Caren shared a piece she started at QBL. It is of course wonderful as her pieces generally are!!
I showed the pieces that I shared in the last post.
Because of the lack of a camera, I missed on taking many pictures of projects. Darn...
First I want to thank my commenters! I always like to get comments.
I still had some of these rectangles left and even though they weren't as nice as the others, thought they deserved chance to be in a piece with proportions that I liked better. Here were my first choices among my remaining pieces.
I also toyed with doing this as I do want to highlight those two remaining blue pieces and will eventually. I discarded this idea but will probably try this again when I have painted some more pieces.
Here is the piece completed. You will note that I replaced one of the red rectangles that I had chosen earlier. I also though that the 1/4 inch red border would accent it. You will notice that there is a lot less white on this one and I found it much more pleasing to the eye which led to the following redoing of the two previous pieces that I had finished (already quilted and bound).
I had liked the thin red strip so much that I decided that I could applique black dividers with red trim between the blocks right over the white. I literally made tubes and was then going to just sew them down. It seemed like a good idea but I know to really audition now!
I didn't like it. The red was too much in this piece (and I knew it would be in its twin horizontal version).
So then I thought maybe just window panes with just the black. I added black to the edges so that each piece would be framed with the same amount of white figuring I would just applique the tubes down. Black is very very forgiving unlike white!! Well, good thing I auditioned as the black border was just much too wide and overpowering.
I ended up appliqueing one inch "tubes" of black between all the rectangles. Then I just sewed new borders right over what was there, making sure I had about the same border of white. And here comes the hard part....
I chopped off a good chunk of the existing border and all the nicely sewn on binding!! Into the trash, but I am much much happier now with the result. I tried small red borders but the pieces already had more than their fair share of red!
Here is the horizontal piece. Guess I do have a series here. I can sleep tonight now. Those two pieces were driving me crazy as I really liked the painted pieces but didn't like the finished pieces!
Well, finally got to quilting the small pieces and did this one first as it was my least favorite of the two. Even with being very careful, there was still some puckering. I think my biggest mistake was using the wool batting instead of some of the cotton remnants I had. Wool is very puffy. I used an even feed foot on all the lines which did eliminate most of the puckering. White is very sensitive and shows every bit of mis-quilting!!
This is the second one I worked on and less puckering with this one so I didn't feel the need to tightly quilt around all the rectangles. I haven't sewn the binding down yet so a littly wiggly around the edges. Still trying to decide whether I will do quilting within the triangles. They don't appear to need it. I do like the images here.
This is a very small piece that just seemed to want to be by itself. I may add some Sharpie coloring around the yellow as it doesn't show up well against the white -- probably a red. Didn't realize until I finished the piece that this was the reverse side of the painting!
These are some more blocks that I am contemplating doing another piece with. I definitely will make the white between the pieces much smaller this time. Wish I had done that with the second piece but too late now!
These are the original three pieces which I had originally thought I would put together but changed my mind as it didn't look interesting enough.
This is all the completed blocks up on my design wall for the disappearing 4 patch baby quilt. It's a little random as I only used leftovers from the previous projects.
Of course, I went to sleep before I did anymore and decided I would like to expand the size by putting it on point. Seemed liked it would work and I needed it to be at least 40 inches wide which it wasn't. I didn't want to make another row of blocks.
Here was my first test and figured it was a go but I did have to make a few more blocks but not as much as I would have with the other orientation.
Well, I got it finished after having to rip out some blocks (of course the same ones) a couple of times. I am a bit compulsive in some ways!
It's not great but it is okay and the backing is bright and cheerful for both of these. I even pieced the batting from many random pieces that I have saved. I am going to keep doing this as it is easy and will get rid of a lot of fluffy random stuff!
Of course I found another bag filled with these 4 1/2 inch by 6 1/2 inch pieces cut from some fabric I had painted and dye painted years ago. I think I was going to do postcards with these as we had a postcard project at one time in RAFA -- a LONG time ago. These really appealed to me just sitting against the white design wall. I had some more of the fabric in the bag so cut as many more pieces as I could of the same size.
This is most of the pieces. I ended up with 21 altogether and I really liked them.
I decided I would construct a series of small pieces with a few of the blocks in each one. I tried surrounding each piece with a small rim of black and that didn't work at all. I added a 2 3/4 inch border around and between the pieces. This one was the vertical presentation. I really sorted through the blocks and did a lot of auditioning to get what I thought was a pleasing arrangement.
I think the black will make a nice frame for the piece though. I haven't even sewn all the white strips on yet. I wanted you to have to get close enough to really see the blocks which is why I didn't put all the blocks in one piece.
This is a second set which I will set horizontally. I still have enough blocks to make at least one if not two more pieces.
Of course, this all has really inspired me to start painting fabric again, something I haven't done in awhile. Some of these blocks are painted with thickened MX dyes and some with acrylic paints. It is hard to tell them apart!.
Well, just when I thought I didn't have anymore bags of stuff to complete, I came upon a bag of leftover squares and accompanying fabric from a baby quilt that I made probably ten years ago. I had thought that just for relaxation (even before I found this bag) that I would do some disappearing 9-patch or 4-patch baby quilts with smaller squares and this fit the bill. I only had to cut some of the accompanying fabric into squares and some of the bolt of white I always have handy!
This was the first 9 patch cut up. In the original 9 patch, the kitty fabrics were in the corners, with white between and purple in the middle square.
I have started adding squares to my design wall. The complication is that the kitties are for the most part directional fabrics to I had to be a little creative in sewing together the 9 patches so they wouldn't all be upside down or sideways when I moved the pieces around.
The top is pretty much sewn together but not big enough so borders are in order -- just enough so that I can use only one width of the fabric I found for backing -- it has kitties on it too! I didn't try to place the green, purple or orange squares so it is pretty random as i didn't want to obsess too much!
Added the borders and almost used up the accompanying fabric. Unfortunately I still had a bunch of squares as well as some of the cut up 9 patches.
So the leftover blocks are being reborn into disappearing 4-patches. Of course I don't have quite enough for a whole baby quilt and it will be a little random looking, but that's okay! At the end, I will still have the leftover 9 patch squares but no more random squares. Here it is with the blocks next to each other..
Here I separated them to see if they would be okay with sashing so I wouldn't have to cut any more squares.
This is a table runner begun many many years ago in a class at quilt club. It was an interesting technique as the curved parts are actually folded down and then machine appliqued down. The class was taught by Annette Ornelas of http://www.southwindquilts.com/. Thanks Barb!! I hadn't remembered but a previous club member reminded me!
Except for hemming the lining , this jacket is completed and I am pleased. I stuck a piece of white fabric for the purpose of showing what it would look like with the white t-shirt I will wear under it. It is lined in black silk which was a bear to work with!!
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