More Fabulous Fun with Fabric Paints

Had a lot of fun painting on fabric in my studio barn this past weekend. 

 Here are some of the fabrics I made.

I did a couple Arashi shibori pieces, wrapping the fabric around a wine bottle, then brushing fabric paint on the protruding folded edges.

Above are the finished, ironed pieces. I love how three dimensional they look, even after ironing.

The above piece was first sun-printed and then I silk-screened one of my favorite poems

 by Langston Hughes on top of it.

The piece above and below were made by splattering, splotching and, scrunching.

New Itajime Quilt

I finished a new art quilt this last week.  It was made from a piece of shibori itajime fabric I made in September of 2014. Itajime is a Japanese shibori technique where fabric is folded and clamped to resist dyes, thus creating patterns.  Prior to using the itajime technique on it, I had low immersion dyed it and stamped it as well. If you want to see more about this fabric just click on my blog posts from September 2014.

Below is a closeup showing the overall spiral quilting designs. 

I used a walking foot very slowly and carefully.

Using Fabric Scraps to Create Cards

One of my friends was commenting on how I hadn't posted in a couple weeks, so I thought I better put something together to show I'm not being a lazy slug. I am finding it a bit difficult to focus on any longterm projects. But I have been doing a little crocheting, and making some cards to send to people in need of them. It's a good way to use up my many scraps.

I layer some fabric strips, weaving them in and out of each other and then start free motion quilting over part of the card. Then I add in more, do more sewing, etc., etc.

They're kind of fun and much faster than making a quilt and just feels right for these times.

I did get into my studio today to do some dyeing, so should be showing the results of those

 later this week.

Dendritic Monoprint Art Quilt

I cut up my latest dendritic mono prints into four inch blocks and used them as a border to the smaller blocks previously. The creating of any art fabric is the most exciting part for me.  This is my piece for  the "Tradition with a Twist" challenge that my Cutting Edge Fiber Art Group is doing. 

I feel the traditional part is the cutting of fabric into blocks and sewing them together like four patch or nine patch quilts, etc. The 'twist' is in using non-traditional hand-printed fabric

 for the blocks to create an art quilt.

I machine and hand quilted the blocks and am adding some hand embroidery

 here and there to further enhance the quilt.

More Fun with Dendritic Monoprinting

I sewed together the cut up dendritic prints made earlier. 

I then decided the piece needed to be larger, 

so painted another piece of fabric.

I painted this by thoughtfully adding acrylic paint to the dampened fabric, then accordion folded it. Next I added more paint to the tops of the folds and put it outside to dry.

This is what it looked like when it dried.

This is after ironing it. I love 

how the folds look so dimensional.

Here it is after doing dendritic mono printing on it.

I used two of my large 12 1/2 inch square acrylic quilting rulers on which to spread the paint

 to create the prints.

Fun with Flower Pounding and Dendritic Mono Printing

I've been playing around with printing techniques the last couple of weeks.  One of my friends in my Cutting Edge group had been talking about doing some flower pounding so I checked that out.

These are geranium petals, which released some beautiful deep colors.

I added some colored pencil details to them, then ended up smudging them, 

then had to bleach out the smudges, which left some yellowing. 

Then I had to rinse out the bleach so it wouldn't eat up the fabric. So now I'm back to paler colors and will need to pound some more petals on them. 

Live and learn!   

From what I read online, I should have soaked my fabric in alum first, which may have helped. 

I will sure give that a try next time.

 Then I moved on to making dendritic mono prints. You may be thinking, what the heck are those?

Dendritic means "Of pertaining to, or resembling a dendrite. A Dendrite is a mineral crystallizing in another mineral in the form of a branching or treelike mark. or a branched part of a nerve cell that transmits impulses toward the cell body.

A mono print is a form of printmaking where the image can only be made once, as opposed to other printmaking which allows for multiple originals. We created some of these in Betty Busby's class last year and it was great fun. It also brought back some great memories of making these in an introductory printing class at Cardinal Stritch college, many moons ago.

I first applied thick acrylic paint, from a squeeze bottle,  to a piece of plexiglass. 

Next, I placed another piece of plexiglass on top and pressed down which squished the paint

 to form an abstract design. 

Then I carefully inserted a pallet knife between the two pieces of plexiglass to separate them.

The pressure of pulling the two pieces of plexiglass apart raises the paint 

into these cool dendrite forms.

Next, I carefully laid a piece of cotton on top of each side and gently pressed with my hand to  capture the design you see in the photo below.

Below are three dendritic prints made previously in Betty Busby's class.

After my dendritic prints dried, 

I painted them to match the background colors of the ones made in Betty's class.

Here are my prints drying outside.

The following day I put them up on my design wall and thought,

 "what the heck can I do with these?"

After playing around with them for awhile, I decided to cut them into squares and rearrange them.  Now I am in the process of sewing them together.

New Shirts and Masks

One of my dear friends is moving to Oregon to be closer to her family. She is a wonderful woman and I will miss her. So I wanted to send her off with a dyed shirt. I made two so she could have a choice of what she would prefer.

Below is an accordion folded and banded shirt ready for dyeing. 

This is the one she ended up choosing.

I used Robin's Egg, Turquoise and Cobalt.

Below is the other shirt, which was pole wrapped, arashi shibori style, ready for dyeing.

On this one I used Robin's Egg, Turquoise, Cerulean, Light Red, and Orchid.

Below are some more masks I whipped up to give to friends

 and others in need.