Fabric Giveaway Time!

It's time for another Printed Fabric Bee giveaway! Susan Purney Mark challenged the hive to create sunflower inspired fabrics!

What a fun collection... all you need to do for a chance to win your own 6" X 6" fabric pack is to post a comment on Susan's blog or The Printed Fabric Bee blog - it's that easy! 

Although sunflowers make everyone smile and it seemed like an easy theme to come up with a design I had some false starts. Each one seemed so simplistic I scraped them until I settled on using Inktense pencils for a more detailed look.

False start #1 and false start #2
The proportions of the flowers on the right were too large to keep going!

I decided to use the piece on the left since the scale was smaller. I applied small brown dots using fabric paint for the sunflower centers. Next I pulled out my Inktense pencils to create the flower pedals.

Inktense pencils are a pretty cool tool. You apply them like any colored pencil but then brush water over the color and they behave like a dye and really pop with color.
I just noticed the Inktense pencils are on sale at Dharma Trading Co - click here for details.

Here is the 6" X 6" piece for the collections give away.

This is Susan's piece. I think some of the flowers wanted to be zinnias rather than sunflowers but the fabric fits nicely into the overall collection and I hope Susan will be pleased!

Click here to hop over to Susan's blog and leave a comment for a chance to win the custom fabric pack ~ the winner will be randomly selected on December 15th!

Screen Collage!

After reading Susan Purney Mark's article titled, "Color Blocking" in the October/November issue of Quilting Arts Magazine I could hardly wait to get started! Susan described using thickened dyes and a silk screen to create blocks of color across the surface of the fabric. I had never thought to use a screen like this; I've only used the screen as a method of transferring a design... this is different - this is cool!  

Susan's technique was very freeing and I've already whipped through 5 yards of of screen collage designs. Here is how I interpreted Susan's method!

I used bright green, raspberry and cobolt blue 

I kept repeating until the surface was filled 

Lastly I added some texture with a non-skid rug mat 

For a twist I added strips of freezer paper on the screen

Once the dye sets I'll add another design to the striped piece... not sure what that will be but it defiantly needs more work! 

Give the technique a try... tweak it and go in all kinds of new directions! 

Thank you Susan...