Play Day

I rewarded myself for those long days of machine quilting with a play day. After transferring all my paints, stencils and gelli plates to the shed for the summer  about a week ago, I spend some time in there today just playing with all those luscious supplies, specially my gelli plate (I only used the 8 x 10" one today) and a wide variety of Stencilgirl stencils.  And here are the results. This is using acrylic paints on paper.

 It's amazing how many papers I ended up with as a result of 2 hours concentrated play.

And finally I decided to also give shaving cream a try. This seems to be cropping up more and more on blogs and YouTube videos but I did this first back in the days (early nineties) when I was studying for my City & Guilds in Embroidery. It involves putting a layer of shaving cream in a tray, then adding inks (I used alcohol inks) and making marbling patterns with a skewer or fork. Lay the fabric gently on top and push it softly with your flat hand. Take it off and remove the shaving cream from the surface of the fabric and what you are left with is a marbled pattern as you can see below. It's messy and unpredictable but lots of fun. I heat set the fabric but I'm not sure just how water resistant this might be. Not that this matters to me as all of my work is meant to go on the wall. And as I can testify alcohol ink is very difficult to remove from both hands and clothing even without heat setting!

I was rather pleased with this piece in particular!