Kismet!

Don't you just love it when you are working away on a piece and it needs something else, and you find the perfect piece of fabric in your stash?!?

A few months ago, I did a workshop with Catherine Nicholls where we explored various pen and ink techniques.  You've see one of my pieces as a result of that workshop in the last Tangled Textiles challenge.

In class we were using the pointillism technique, and a maple leaf.  I was working on plain white pfd fabric, and while I liked my leaf, the black and white was just too stark.  When I got home I decided to play with some inks I had picked up at a quilt show earlier in the summer.  I dampened my fabric and then dropped red, yellow and blue ink on it to try and create reds, oranges and greens.  It was the start of fall and I was seeing colour beginning to appear in the trees.  Because ink will travel quite freely on dampened fabric, it didn't pay any attention to the shape of the leaf as dictated by my dots - resulting in a colour wash around the leaf as well as on it.  I added more yellow in the background to soften the white, and it was okay.

 

We had also done some letter outlining - again mine was black on white and very stark.  It was a nice sunny day, so I thought I would try some sun printing using some leaves from our Japanese Maple tree.  I dampened the fabric, but this time I put some ink and water in a little spray bottle and spritzed the fabric, placed my leaves, and put it out in the sun.  The results were mediocre - the leaf outlines just weren't very sharp.  With nothing to lose, I grabbed my black ink pad, pressed the Japanese Maple leaves into it, and then printed them onto the cloth in roughly the same spots they had been on for the printing - much better!  A final brush with a bit of green ink and I'm liking it!

 

My piece still needed something else.  Two years ago and the CQA Conference in Halifax I had taken a workshop with Gunnel Hag on surface design.  We had printed some large maple leaves on fabric.

Amazingly, the colours I had printed were almost identical to the colours I had ended up with in my dyeing experimentations!  Still too much white background, though, so everything went into a strong tea bath to tone them down and tie them together.  Now we're happening!  The printed leaves needed a bit more definition, so I had fun with some pointillism on them.  All those tiny dots - it is very soothing - zen-like to dot away - I may end up adding dots to all kinds of things!

Time to piece it all together, and do my usual very dense quilting.  :)

 

love this sunny shot to show off the quilting texture!

 

and there she hangs - welcoming folks to our fall home.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends!

Happy quilting!

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