It's been a busy week....

I guess it's always busy when you are retired! Right!  Seems like I'm always going somewhere every day!  But in between lunches, meeting with friends, I have been sewing!

I wanted to play more with thread painting that I showed last week (you can see that here).   I ended up using this piece as a practice piece for painting the thread work (no, I don't like the green either!) and to decide what thread for quilting the background fabric.

I  also started to design some different patterns to add to my deconstructed screen print fabric I want to use.  I just didn't like the one strip on the piece above.  I still had some of the purple/maroon fabric leftover from the quilt top I made a few weeks ago so I cut 1 1/2" stripes into different lengths (2 1/2", 3", 5" etc.).  Then I sewed them together in long strips.  Then I traced my leaf design onto the screen printed panel  and free motion quilted the leaves.

Since I didn't like the green paint I dug in my paint box and came up with some of these samples!

Yes, I cut up the quilt practice piece!

  Yep, I played quite a bit!  But what worked the best was my Neocolor ii crayons!  Who knew!














Once I colored the thread painted leaf, then I took a brush with water and blended the crayon.  Then I free motion quilted the rest of the piece.

End result with the inserts...

And now with the binding added.  I'm happy with how this turned out...but now I'm on to a new project or two!

A little playtime

I was tidying up my stack of supplies on Monday, as well as packing up supplies for a playday next week when I thought...hmmmmm...why not play with some rubbings....actually, I had some white fabric and a piece of screen print that was a  tad bland...good pieces for rubbings.  So...what else to do but play!

We are going to work with alcohol inks on fabric next week and I thought this quilted piece would look better with a different color than, no color!    It's a white piece of muslin I  free motion quilted with tricolor thread.

I'm thinking I can somehow put a wash of color on this piece!  

I used this stamp on the screen printed fabric.

 I screen printed this earlier in the winter.  And with a little rubbing it turned out not so bad.


I used  a Gelatos pigment stick rubbed over the stamp for the bright green area.

These next two pictures are the same fabric above but showing areas that I used Neocolor 1 crayons on.

 I wanted a mix of Neocolor 1 crayon and Gelatos pigment stick.

I used Inkense Block on this piece....

Oil Pastel crayon on this one....

And Neocolor 1 crayons on this one.  

I had a rubber stamp with me that I use for rubbings on a narrow strip of fabric.  Again, good testing  using Neocolor 1 crayons as a resist.

Guess we'll see in another week how they work with the inks!

New Products

Not sure how many of you know Hilary B!   Hilary is from the UK and creates amazing work so make sure you check out her blog or her FB page.  I also love how she shares her work via video's.  A few of those video's Hilary was using products I've used before as well as one I had not heard of.  Well, of course, I had to order from Dick Blick (they had the best price I found) and Sunday I played with them!

My first purchase was  Neocolor Artists crayons.  I 've used these at a workshop I attended several years ago and honestly forgot about them.   These are nice and work well direct on the fabric or brushing on water for a watercolor effect.

Next purchase was Gelatos, pigment sticks (I ordered the pastels).  These are so cool!!   I honestly had not heard about them before....living in a cave you know!  HA  This is the exact set I ordered.  I like the pastel shades

These are really nice...again, you can rub directly on fabric or use water to blend.  And they blend quite nicely on the fabric too.

And a pic of my Inktense blocks. I bought these last winter in Florida and they are fun to play with.  Really work well with stencils and you can add water to your fabric before or after (to blend).

One of my art friends in Florida, Beth, gave several of us gals this stitched flower so we could play with our Inktense blocks.












I use all three products to color Beth's stitched flower.     I started to use a little square (left side) to document each  product and how they looked with water or alone, which I will keep.  But once I got started I just mixed all the products together!!  And they each work well with one another.  That's a good thing!!

We'll see where this piece goes.  I need to do some highlights/shading/etc. to make the flowers look more like flowers!!  I don't want Beth to think I messed up her nice 'gift' to us!   Fun products and I just might use the blocks on my table topper I posted about last time!  Hard to leave well enough alone isn't it!