blueprinting

Yesterday my friend Kelly and I played with a - for us - new type of printing technique. We used lightsensitive fabric on top of a piece of board, pinned a number of foamy fishes and milkbottle collars on it and placed the board into the sunshine. The fabric was light green before we started working on it and after half an hour it had turned into a olive kind of green. It did not look at all as the instruction manual said it should. After rinsing the fabric luckily it got the color it is supposed to have. The picture at the left shows how it looked before it was placed into the sunshine. The picture at the right shows the final result. Does it not look gorgeous? It is definately a technique/material which I will use more often in the future.
For any one who is interested in this technique, on www.blueprintsonfabric.com you can read more about it. They are also the ones who sell this special type of fabric.

this and that

No pictures today. The last couple of days I have not been able to do much with fabric or dyes. I made 2 blocks with the black and white strata's I showed on previous posting but that is all.
Further I started to experiment a bit with needlefelting. I am a member of a journalquiltgroup. In this group we make a journal quilt every month. What I am felting at the moment I want to use for coming months journal quilt. But this sample is still in an early stage.

black and white

This is the beginning of a new black and white quilt. Not much to be seen yet :-). I had so much fabric remaining after the nyb that I decided to make another quilt in these colors. For this one I am using the strippiecing technique which Louisa Smith describes in her book "Strips 'n curves". The fabric is cut into 1,5" strips which are sewed together. The template is than put onto this new created fabric and cut out. The templates are sewed together into blocks and there is the quilt. Okay, it takes a bit more time than this explanation, but in short that is how the quilt is made. The templates I will be using are a variation on the drunkards' path. Some of them will be made from black fabric, others from white and again others from a combination of both.

ccrr

With my dyeing group we are doing a twin complex cloth round robin. That is we started with a similar fabric send to two different persons who each work on it without knowing what the other group is doing. The mail has brought me the 2 ccrr's which you see on these pictures. The top one started as a violet dyed piece of fabric. The 2nd participant used cold batix wax with a stamp on it and dyed the fabric lapis. The 3rd added stamped dragon flies. When I saw this fabric it was actually complete for me but I had to add something so I diluted silver textile paint with a lot of water and brushed this over the whole piece. It now has a light sparkle all over it.

This is the other fabric which started out as a pole shibori dyed fabric. The 2nd participant in this group added a sun to the fabric using a stencil. I decided to go along with this theme and found a bamboo stencil which I used twice on this piece using green fabric paint.

digitalis quilt

This picture is a detail of the triptych I am working on. The 3 panels are now finished, that is to say the piecing and the inserts are done. The next step is to add my favourite batting (fusible Hobbs) and fabric for the back and iron everything together.
For adding the leaves of the foxgloves I will be using another technique: fusible applique. I am not yet certain whether I will raw edge them or use the standard satinstitch. There will also be a number of fused applique flowers added.
Creatively speaking this was all I did last week. I have no girl to help me with the cleaning at the moment, so I had to do some - very necessary - housecleaning myself :-(.