12 Days of Christmas 2015 – Day 7 – Focus on Surface Design

Todays special is a simple one.  I have taken $45 off the Jacquard Screen Printing Kits – they are now only $60, while stock lasts.  Here is the link:  http://www.uniquestitching.com.au/p/9074603/jacquard-screen-printing-kit.html

I also want let you know that I have opened up bookings on our first online class for a long time. I have upgraded all the technology so it will be full of video, forum, and feedback. You can join at any time, but if you join before 31st December 2015, there is some added bonuses.

This is your opportunity to do some of the classes I teach in Houston and Birmingham without having to leave your home.  You can click on the flyer to find out more details.  This will be a comprehensive coverage of a broad range of surface design techniques and once you have access to the material it is your forever.  You can keep going back to it at any time.

Stunning Surfaces Art Cloth Online Class 2016

 

creating with paint and lutradur – again.

Today was spent avoiding the heat inside with paint, deColourant, lutradur and my all faithful heat gun (which stopped me avoiding heat because first it generates a lot and second I had to go outside to use it).

Last week I dyed a run of colour for a project and, as I usually do, made mud fabric.  A mud fabric is one where you pour all your excess dye on top of some fabric and see what comes up.  It is seldomly what you expect as the dyes take differently and some are expiring by the time they go on the scraps.  Anyway, back on task.  I dyed a metre of one fabric and threw in the spare fat quarter.  The run was of 21 fabrics, so I had one left over. 

Today I screen printed with one of the ‘word’ screens I made.  I used a range of deColourant Plus to match the fabrics.  Here is the finished result.  I like it a lot and expect my mud fabric will be used before the actual fabrics I dyed.

The other thing I have been doing today is experimenting with fabric paint and more lutradur.   I painted the fabric then vliesofixed black lutradur over the fabric which dulled the paint down and gave it some more texture.  I then sponged more fabric with the same paints which will be borders and a little bit over the black lutradur. 

two borders sewn on the muted centre

Whilst this was drying, I heated some Lutradur I had prepared.  In the first piece I stitched a grid with cotton thread, using a decorative stitch.  The second, I ironed some hot fix Angelina on the lutradur.  I heated both extensively with the heat gun distressing it a lot.

Distressed Gold lutradur - Very distressed!

I will put this all together as soon as it all dries.  If I can I will post a photo tomorrow.  This is the second in my black and gold lutradur series and can be either quilted or mounted on a canvas.  These will be used as class samples for my mixed media classes this year.

As always, I am interested in your thoughts.

Update on my geometric fabric

For those of you waiting to see what I am doing, I have finally done the next layer on this fabric.  After a great deal of thought, I added two more elements.  I used Crimson Lumiere Paint with my Corn Chips screen and Copper Lumiere Paint with my Tangled Triangles screen.  I toyed with adding some metallic foil, but I have decided that this is enough.  I have a plan for what I am doing with it next.  Here are some photos.

some detail

More detail

I have dyed 12 half metre pieces to go with this fabric.  Here they are:

6 tints of Rust Orange

6 tints of Chocolate

 

Now that these are ready, I know what I am doing with it.  A very simple quilt top which will hopefully show case my surface design. 

However, instead of heading straight to the sewing machine, I have three classes to upload onto the online classes.

Finally! My Screens are ready.

I wish I had twice as much time in every day.  I never have enough.  So, invariably, things I intend to do take longer than I expect. 

I have had a series of ready made screeen prints on the drawing board for a long time.  I ordered the raw materials I needed about three months ago, and I finally got everything in the last week.  I have ten ‘textures’ ready to go with ten ‘botanicals’ still in progress.  Last night I burned about 100 screens.  Today I made some samples.  Here are a couple of photos of my two favourites.

Triangle Tangle

I used Lumiere Paints on all of the samples over one of my hand painted fabrics.

I think the “Matchsticks” are really cool and will be using these a lot.

Matchsticks twice - two different colours

Here I ‘screened’ Matchsticks once with the dark blue and then threw some Citrene over the blue, so I got a blend of the two colours during the second ‘screen’.

A mess of matchsticks

This is matchsticks repeated about 6 times with different coloured paint.  Love it.  What do you think.