22 October 2012

3rd Anniversary Giveaway day 2

Friday my friend, Kit Lang, an amazing and fearless quilt artist from Canada, sent me an email about my anniversary giveaways. I  think it was at that moment when I realized I had to come up with 8, yes 8, new and interesting posts to go along with the giveaways. YIKES! I'm not known as the "fly by the seat of the pants girl" for nothing.

Well, I have five so far for this week - been busy. Now, I do want to mention that I did finish "Woodland Frost" in plenty of time to have it framed and ready for today's post. However what I didn't realize was that I was out of framing materials. Tomorrow I will visit the lumber yard and have the stuff delivered (I've got a tiny car).

OK so here it goes. What probably most of you don't know is that I have many outlets for my artistic expression. I throw pottery, paint, sculpt and create other 3 dimensional pieces, do pen and ink sketches, make books, dolls, woodworking, jewelry, and even fly tying. Well, on my sketching and watercolor blog I am planning on doing some watercolors of leaves. So yesterday in the rain I picked up a few leaves that looked interesting enough to paint. I took some photos of them in case they curled up and dried out. I wanted them fresh.


In a recent post I showed the colorways I dyed for "Woodland Frost". I had some lovely greens that I thought would go well with purples and lavender so I cut an 18" square and ironed it up.


Yes, That is the FINISHED "Woodland Frost" on my bed and the mini-woodland frost next to the green fabric.



This is my table under the skylight where I spend most of my day. I am applying the periwinkle paint to the BACK (veiny side) of the leaf with the sponge pouncer on the right. I move the leaf to a new spot of the paper for each application to keep the front of the leaf paint free. I then use a hard rubber brayer and roll the painted leaf onto the fabric. It is important to keep the paint off the brayer so that you don't
get unintentional paint on the fabric on the next roll. I am printing on a 1" sheet of Styrofoam covered with a scrap of an old quilt and then felt. More about this later in the week. It is important to always print fabric on a slightly padded surface.



Here is the fabric with periwinkle blue leaf prints on it which weren't showing up that well. I am using ProChemical and Dye "Profab" fabric paint which is not quite as thick as artists acrylics but loads well on a brush, sponge and silk screens or thermofaxes well. It has very nice "body"



A great close up of the back of the leaves


The finished fabric. I used periwinkle blue, purple, then mixed the periwinkle with the purples a few times for different values and I mixed bright yellow with a tiny touch of black to get that great olive color.


A close up of the leaf prints. Nice, yes? This is a simple project perfect for this time of year. If you don't have fabric paints, you can use acrylics. The hand of the fabric will be a tad stiff but who really cares. I will make something nice out of this. Perhaps a book cover or a small bag for cosmetics or pencils and pens.

Giveaway Day 2


Leave a comment for an opportunity to win this DVD

11 comments:

  1. Great leaf prints! I shall be trying this! I love the feather - was this done the same way? the print is wonderfully crisp!
    I didn't know you had another blog, I'm off there now!
    Thanks for a fabulous giveaway! I've only recently discovered QA magazine!

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  2. I've recently been fascinated with needle felting and machine felting and would love to win this DVD. Your leaf prints are beautiful, a good way to memorialize autumn. Throwing on a wheel is one of my favorite things to do, too, love the feel of the clay.

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  3. It´s great to capture the season in this way!

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  4. i love the leaf printing- want to try this idea soon please enter me in the draw

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  5. Great print. I am just making a book with the autumn theme, so I can try it right away.

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  6. Your leaves turned out great!

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  7. Love your woodland frost! Your leaves look great. Maybe this weekend I'll give it a try.

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  8. Love your prints - I'm going to try this. :)

    (And thanks for the mention!)

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  9. Let me know if you are gonna give away that print! It is luscious!

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  10. hey I am just happy I am back on my blog

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  11. I love printing with leaves and feathers and yours looks great, lovely colours. I have an embelisher machine but am way too heavy handed with it so I would love the chance to win Pokey's DVD. Happy Blogversary!

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