Mini Quilt Exchange

Just finished another round of the Mini QT swap on Flickr. This round's theme was true-mini. Here's the one I made for JanBran:

Flowers are free-motion machine quilted.

A closer look.

And here's the one she sent me (and all the goodies):

Love the little embroidered blocks!

And here's the one I made for my Etsy shop, just because I liked making the first one so much:

Mini-Quilt for Sale

The next round is for Halloween themed mini's - I am sitting that round out as I've signed up for too many things and can't make the commitment. 

Have you ever done an online swap? What's your favourite type of swap?

--Ann

Fabric Painting (Part Three)

One of the techniques in the book for adding texture to a painted piece was to crinkle the fabric up.

Crinkled fabric drying on lawn (subliminal message: you do not see dandelions in my lawn!)

Dryed and pressed fabric that was crinkled

 And finally, after a long day of fun in the sun, it was time to clean up. I still had a few pieces of fabric left and we still had some mixed fabric paint left, so we improvised and finished everything up rather than throw anything away.

Top fabric - fingers were dipped into the paint and then sprinkled over the fabric. Some of the mixed paint was opaque and some transparent - can you tell which is which? We also had some cute elastic shapes that we put on top of the fabric for sun-printing - these worked quite well.
Middle fabric - sponged leftovers onto fabric and heavily salted. Love the way the salt provides texture to the finished pieces.
Bottom right - last piece of fabric was just dipped into the remaining containers one corner at a time and allowed to soak up the remaining paint. Result was a nice saturated blend of colours. Again, this one was thoroughly salted.

Close up of corner of the last piece of fabric

 All that was left to do was wipe the tables and pack everything back into the house for me, the car for my 2 friends. Rather than use paper towels for wiping up between pieces of fabric, I used a single piece of fabric. This is what it looked like at the end of the day:

May all your messes be beautiful!

--Ann

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

Fabric Painting (Part One)

Yesterday, a couple quilting friends came over to experiment with fabric paint in my backyard. We had a beautiful sunny day and set up some tables to work on. This was my first time to use fabric paint and although I knew we'd have a good time, I wasn't sure that I would end up with any pieces that would be usable in my quilting. The paints we used were Setacolor from Pebeo. Non of our local quilting shops carried them, so we found some at Colours Calgary. The fabric I used was just a white Kona cotton. I bought 3 meters and prewashed it so there would be nothing to interfere with the fabric paint.

Ironing the washed fabric before painting.

 We set up a few tables in the backyard. One table had all our supplies and each of us had our own tables for working on. This set-up worked great for us. The work tables were covered with either a drop sheet or a disposable plastic table cloth to protect them from spills (and we did spill!)

The supply table

 Because the Setacolors are photosensitive, we collected a variety of supplies that could be placed on top to leave an imprint on the fabric. The dollar store was a great source for these - the stars on the blue fabric below were found there.

Blue skies

 One of the books we used for inspiration was Mickey Lawler's Sky Dyes. I started off following her directions for making skies, but in keeping with my nature of not wanting to follow directions, soon went off just doing what I felt like!

Blues and green

Applying paint to the fabric

Test samples are a good idea

 Here's my friend, Kathleen, with one of her pieces:

Base layer of oranges and reds

Adding willow leaves

Images left when fabric is dry and willow leaves are removed.

These are my samples from the day's fun.

Have you ever dyed or painted fabric? Did you enjoy it? What kind of project did you use the finished fabric in?

--Ann