Watercolor Workshop

 A woman with whom I am friendly from my BOM club really liked the watercolor crayon stuff I was doing and asked me to do a workshop with her.

 So I packed up my brushes, textile mediums, and texture plates and went over to her house for a fun morning.


She had a couple of embroidery machines and uses them a lot for quilting.  She made up a bunch of samples with neutral threads on neutral backgrounds and we got out the crayons and played.


The texture plates were the most fun.  We put the fabric over the plates and rubbed the crayons on the fabric.

Then we brushed on the the textile medium -- we used my GAC 900 by Golden.

She made up a bunch of embroideries and her 13-year-old granddaughter had fun coloring.





I really like the colors she chose.

 I think my favorite is this sailboat.









But the butterfly is pretty neat too.

Curses! Foiled Again!

 Last week on my design wall, there was this piece of fabric that I had to do something to.  But I wasn't sure exactly what to do to it.

I finally decided to do some more foiling.  Yep -- foiled again!  But no cursing.

 Because it had already been foiled with glue, I used black Mistyfuse shapes and scattered them around the piece.  I really like the black Mistyfuse on the black background.  I had to be careful not to hit the previous foiling with my iron and I also made sure I worked around it with the fusible web.

I pressed the pieces of Mistyfuse, then added the foil on top.  I really like the way the foil isn't a solid blob -- it has the pattern from the fusible because the foil sticks only to the glue in the fusible web.



This is the final finished piece.  It was dyed, then waxed and over-dyed, then foiled twice.

 This is my final art cloth.  It started out as a snow-dyed madala, looking something like the piece on the left.  I know I took a photo of it before I sent it on its journey, but I can't find it.  Fortunately, I had two that were almost alike.

Beth from Maine was the first to get it.  She used something called "fugitive media."   Basically, it means that she used things that normally aren't permanent on fabric -- chalk pastels and water soluble oil pastels in this case -- then she painted them with base extender and heat set.  There is a much more eloquent explanation of fugitive media here at "...And Then We Set it on Fire."

Then Laura painted it with red Setacolor paint and sun-printed it using round shapes, foam cut outs and gravel from her driveway as resists.

Here is a detail showing the paint and the final foiling that Jenny did.  She followed the starburst design that happened during the original dyeing.  It's a pretty amazing piece.  I'm enjoying having it up on my design wall.

For other design walls, click here to go to Judy's blog.