In the Woods

One of the advantages of this wonderful, tropical weather is that things dry super fast and it offers a great opportunity to do some fabric painting. At the same time it means you have to be quick as the paints dry so fast that you have to clean up all materials asap before the paint becomes so fixed you can't remove it. This is particularly the case for Thermofax screens, which I was using today. All the lettering you see is from one produced by Ineke Berlyn.I used quite a bit of the screenprinting paint I bought from her during the Loch Lomond Quilt Show when we were exhibiting together in the same church.It's gorgous and I particularly love the metallic colours (well, I would, wouldn't I?).

The July theme for the Sketchbook Challenge is In the Woods, so I concentrated my efforts on finding interesting leaves in our very own wood (very small!) in the garden and used them as resists on my Gelli plate and also to stamp with, once they were covered in paint. I don't know yet how I will use these fabrics exactly but in the not too distant future I hope to show you the finished journal quilt, which will incorporate one or more of them. Knowing me, I'll probably use parts of all of them!

 I couldn't begin to tell you how I ended up with the finished results. Once I get going I grab whatever I think will contribute to a multi layered effect on the cotton. There is spraying through stencils, stamping with real stamps and with the leaves, a bit of gelli printing, using the leaves as a resist, Thermofax printing and most of these methods are used more than once on all the fabrics.

I've used up most of my PFD (prepared for dying) cotton now but the good news is that I will soon have more!

I have the feeling the above printed leaf image will become the star of my journal quilt, but we'll see! As it's such glorious weather I have only reluctantly torn myself away from the garden to come inside to post this and my blip, but if you don't hear much from me at the moment, that's because I'm soaking up the sun!