Tag Archives: collage

Always Ideas

I’m getting ready to teach a class on Sunday, these are strange times to be teaching live, but I really am looking forward to it.

As promised I have a new video. It seems the more I play with ways to get paint onto fabric the more ideas I get, and for me ideas lead to more ideas to try.

I’ll be announcing a new giveaway in October so if you are interested I hope you’ll stop by. For now enjoy the video, I hope it gives you some new ideas.

Brown Paper Bonus

A little glitch has caused my Printed, Painted Background Fabric video, that I mentioned in my previous post, to be delayed. In the video I will demonstrate how I achieved these fabrics and papers. Here are a few ways I’m using the backgrounds. I call them backgrounds but they aren’t only that.

Hand embroidered stylized hummingbird.
I think this is calling for free motion quilting.
I cut a stencil for the flowers. It’s hard to see but there is part of an unryu paper vase, this piece will be collaged, I think I’ll add some embroidery to the flowers too.
I thought I wanted a purple pumpkin but embroidered the body lines using orange floss so changed the plan. I will be posting a second video for how I painted this work in progress (wip) pumpkin.

This final piece is the brown paper bonus – it had been used to print/paint the trees trunks above. This piece is still a wip and is on a canvas, the moon is a painted coffee filter, and the large rock isn’t glued down yet. It is titled She Rocked Beneath the Full Moon. In honor of the rock climbing women I know.

the large rock and the cliff were from the same piece of brown paper.

I hope these pieces piqued your curiosity and that I’ll be able to actually share a video next time. Maybe you’ll have ideas for pieces that could be made with the printed, painted fabric and the paper too.

Painted Fabric – Cardboard Resist

This is the first cardboard resist piece I made, it was made on a painted (light wash) piece of fabric and I used two colors for the design. Read on to find out more and for the How-to video see below.

For this next piece I left some of the backside tip fabric unpainted (no yellow), once dry and pressed I painted orange dots to the centers. I didn’t like that result, they felt too deliberate. The holes were in a tighter placement and I don’t think the overall results were as good, BUT maybe it’s just the colors; I think these colors would have been more striking on a white background.

Below is the only piece (so far) painted on white fabric, the picture doesn’t show how pretty it really is. I forgot to take a photo before I cut some pieces out, that’s the photo-shopped out white areas.

The next piece didn’t go as I had hoped. I started with a piece of rope wrapped fabric in green (more about that in a future post). I used three colors on the green background, which was an okay idea, but again the holes were too close. I’ve concluded that there needs to be more fabric and space between the holes.

  • black paint at edge
  • yellow paint on tip
  • flipped it and painted third color
  • back dry, not pressed
  • front dry, not presses.
  • front pressed, can’t really see the centers.

I did use the the above fabric but it doesn’t look anything like it did after painting. In my previous post I share the crackle/crinkle painted fabric and said I’d try to share an artwork using that technique and this newest paint technique. Here it is… Mixed media collage, raffia, coffee filter, and hand painted fabric. I may talk about the background wall fabric in a future post.

Untitled. Approximately 15.5″ x 11.5″

I learned more… One – I wanted the vase to be shiny so I painted Mod Podge on it, when it dried it was shiny BUT the crackles and crinkles were no longer visible. And two – Dry Mod Podge is really hard to wash out of fabric! I ended up flipping the fabric over and that worked fine, it’s actually darker than it appears in this photo.

After painting a few pieces I have more ideas for using this technique. If you paint fabric using any of these techniques I hope you’ll share your results.

Stay tuned for the next sweepstakes/giveaway announcement.