A Block, a Ribbon and a Prompt

Those of you who have been long time visitors here know that I like to enter challenges. For the past 5 years, I have entered the quilt block contest held annually at Joseph Schneider haus in Kitchener On. This years theme was "What's in a Name" The rules stated that the title must have a "proper"name and that there be some use of gold in the fabric or embellishment. My entry is called Sarah's Garden. It is hand appliqued and embroidered......birds, vines, blossom, melons and garden tools

 I generally find that the most difficult part is composing the statement that must accompany any entry. Since this week's CPP word #157, is Write .........I thought I'd share what I wrote for this block

Welcome to Sarah's garden, where perched on lacy vines, 

birds sing among the blossoms while watching over the days work. 

Delight in the beauty and feast on the harvest.

of course, for the prompt response, I also had to toss in a doodle.

as you can see, these birds are very small

a 1st place reward

Wash test

 My last post about using paints and inks on fabric along with various "extenders" led to many of you asking if the painted/inked fabric can be washed. The short answer is that once heat set, these products are supposed to be permanent.......but, of course, I had to test this. I took the sample that I showed in that post and sliced a couple of strips off, enough to be able to wash (by hand, in warm soapy water) I made a couple of notes so that I could easily line it all back up again, I did it this way so that I could now compare the washed pieces to the originally painted/inked fabric.

Looks good to me!

 There was no bleeding and it appears that there was no colour loss or fading either. Generally, we are not going to wash a painted quilt but, it is nice to know that if it did get wet, it won't be ruined.

Mediums, Gels and Extenders .....oh my!

If you stop by here occasionally, then you know that I very much enjoy experimenting with paints as well as inks. Most of the time the paints/inks are not used straight from the bottle, they have to be mixed with something to help them flow across the fabric easier. I decided to make myself a little sample piece as reference to see what happens to the fabric when each of these products are added to paint and then applied to fabric. Here is what I did. I took 2 pallets, one for SetaColor transparent paint and the other for FW acrylic inks.(also transparent) I have a number of gels, mediums,and extenders....each with its own viscosity.

On each pallet, I mixed my colour (paint or ink) with roughly equal amounts of each of the products you see in the photo.
On fabric, I drew decent sized circles and labeled them. One row is the SetaColor paint mixture and the other is the inks. The first circle in each row is the paint or ink straight from the bottle, so you can see the true colour. I used colours that looked  fairly close to each other......Vermillon in the paint and Scarlet in the ink. The colour intensity will depend on the ratio you use when mixing the paints or inks with the mediums.

The hand of the fabric changes very little with any of these products, you may notice a different "feel" if you pass your hand across the painted surface, but the fabric itself is still very pliable and easily stitched.
In case you can not read the labels in the photo.....I used....Clear Aloe Vera gel (find it at the drugstore....has to be the clear stuff) there is an acrylic glazing liquid by Golden, a Floating Medium by Folk Art, Colourless Extender by Jacquard and Lightening Medium by Pebeo.

I seem to have fallen behind in The Creative Prompt Project once again.....the current  word was Present, my response is this quick paper cut.

More Fabric Painting

I promised I would show you more of the fabric painting project that I have been working on. But I was scheduled to do a presentation at the Oxford Quilters Guild this week (well 2 actually, since they have an evening and morning program) and wanted to give them first peak at this work. I am not accustomed to public speaking and making presentations, but all of the guild members were so receptive, they welcomed me with great energy and made me feel at ease, it was a fabulous experience.
I mentioned that even though I have played with paint for a while now, I thought it was time to take a class. I signed up for an online class through Craftsy, for one called Painting Pictorial Quilts with Annette Kennedy.

This is one of the class projects. Here you see the beginning stage, the bloom is one piece of fabric, as is the leaf and then the stems are another. They are simply cut and fused to the background fabric. looking pretty plain.

then you see the drama unfold as depth and shadow is added, simply with paint. in this photo just the leaf and stem have had paint applied

here is the finished painted Calla Lily  (the background colour is more true in all of the other photos, not sure why this looks quite so purple)

 A very small amount of stitching is added

 and here is it bordered, quilted and bound.

This class was great fun, well laid out, and best of all you can pause, back-up and re-watch segments as many times as you need. I followed the instructions and did it all her way, for my first attempt, I am really quite pleased with the result, my plan is to now take what I have learned and apply this using my own photos. I can hardly wait to get started

Marking circle placement

I am still working away on my applique quilt, for the final border, I choose a pieced and applique block. There are lots of them and I wanted to be sure that all of the circles would end up in the exact same spot on each block. Rather than measuring each one, I simply made a quick template out of card stock. I laid it on the fabric, drew the circle placement and now I can be sure they will all be consistent.

appliqued circles

Because I use an applique method that requires the block to be immersed in warm water to remove the freezer paper, I actually made the block a bit larger and cut it to the proper measurements, (just in case that process might cause a bit of distortion) once dry, I trimmed them before moving on to piecing the corners. Used the template again, to be certain the circles remained in the proper position.

paper removed......drying

one of 56

Looks as though Blogger has decided to make some improvements.............liked it better before. oh well, its probably only because I was comfortable with the old way of doing the job  :-)

Just going to half to learn how to deal with these changes.  Hopefully it won't take too long to figure this out.

Fabric Painting...........practice

I recently signed up for an on-line class, involving painting on fabric. I'll talk more about the class and the projects later, but for now I want to show you what I did this weekend. I watched the videos and while I wanted to dive right in to the project, I decided to do a couple of little sample bits first, to get the feel and to discover what products I liked best. I don't have the "floating" medium used by the instructor, so I wanted to test what I did have on hand.
I began by drawing a simple leaf, with paper backed fusible on the wrong side I cut these out and fused them to a background fabric.


All of the leaves would be painted using the same paints, but for each, these paints were mixed with a different medium. (Fabric sucks up paint very quickly, a medium is necessary, it gives you more time to work with the paint, move it easily and helps with the ability to blend the colours.)
This first leaf was painted using clear aloe-vera gel mixed into Seatacolor transparent paint. Isn't it amazing how just a little paint can transform fabric? I have played with, and talked about using Aloe Vera gel before, those posts are here


For the middle one I used a colourless extender made by Jacquard and the third was a mixture using an acrylic glazing liquid by Golden.


While this was not part of the class, I found that I learned a great deal from this simple exercise. In my next post, I'll tell you what some of those things were and show where I went from here.

ATC swap

If you read my last post and went over to the Quilting Gallery, you know that there is an Artist Trading Card "swap" planned. Registration is now open, click here or on this button to learn more and possibly join in.
Here are some of my finished ones. These are from those transfer printed doodles on paper towel/quilting experiment I did.

I had a few little leftover bits.....too small for an ATC even.....or were they? I always have some small quilt sandwiches lying around that I use to practice FMQ. So I cut one up and stitched those small leftovers onto them and they are now ATCs as well.


Then there was this one......hmmmmm needs something.........


how about just adding a few little discs? I think that worked quite well.

Do you wanna know?

Are you still curious about what I was going to do with this?
If your answer is Yes......pop on over to the Quilting Gallery, where I am today's guest blogger, click here to see just what I was up to.

here is a little hint

Image Transfer

There are several ways to transfer an image to fabric, some can be time consuming, others can get a little expensive. Today I am talking about one of the least expensive and quickest methods of all, and that is done using T-shirt transfer paper. It is a great option for the times when you need to get the job done quick. I must mention that this method will change the hand of your fabric somewhat, but I am finding that they have greatly improved and don't leave the fabric feeling quite so "plastic-y" as they did just a few years ago. The paper I used for my current projects, is by Avery, but many retailers may have their own store brand as well. The Avery pack comes with very good, detailed instructions.I set up, by lowering my ironing board to a level that will allow me to stand over it and put good, even pressure while bearing down with my iron.
I slip a solid board into a pillowcase, this becomes my actual ironing surface and as you can see by the top photo, excellent results were achieved on a variety of fabrics, including papertoweling. That hard surface is the key to success.

I experimented a little beyond simply printing on it and I thought I show you the results. There are always little leftover bits when you trim around the image before pressing.....DON'T throw them out, you can't put them back through the printer, but you CAN still play with them.
Here I took a leftover bit and drew on it with a simple ball point pen.
Now, I could have transferred that as is, but I wanted to take it a step further. I got out some of my acrylic inks and did a wash over the paper........that workedso then I tried brushing those inks on the paper and once it had dried, I drew on it......that worked too!

And here they are after being transferred to fabrics..........I'll do a bit of stitching and likely turn these into postcards.



As I said there are several varieties of transfer papers on the market, you need to test them and decide what works best for you and the results you wish to achieve..........and yes, I have tried TAP........I blogged about it here.

Going in Circles

I am working on a quick little project, that I can't really share just yet, but I thought I'd give you a bit of a peek.
Just for the fun of it, I drew lots of overlapping, various sized, circles and then filled them in with doodles.I scanned it into my computer, it was then printed onto transfer paper and ironed onto some of my pieces of painted paper towelingI LOVE the way the blended colours show through those bold, black graphic lines.then I quilted

you will have to wait just a little while to see what this becomes.