Catching Up

Here are photos of my booth in Bloomington, IN along with my friend Cynthia who was my helper for  2 days.  I think she enjoyed getting out with people for awhile.

We demo-ed painting with Tsukineko inks in the bottle.  They are wonderful to paint with!  They don’t change the hand of the fabric like acrylic fabric paints do.  If you mix them with aloe vera gel to paint with like we do, you have the ability to spread them and blend them.

Various And Sundry Things

By my calculations, it’s almost 10 years since I started dyeing my own cloth. Ten years…sounds like such a long time!  Actually it’s the same amount of time we have been living here in southern Illinois.  It was 10 years ago this month or in April (can’t remember which), that I took a dyeing class…and it’s been uphill ever since.  Wow. 10 years.  I feel like such a pro!

What else have I been doing?  In between shows and teaching I do get to play around once in a while.  A couple of weeks ago I tried my hand at embossing black silk velvet. I used a rubber stamp with hand writing on it…cool, huh!

Naw…you’re not supposed to be able to read it!

At the Bloomington quilt show, my demo helper was a bit shy about trying to paint a face with Tsukineko inks, so I took the plunge.  It’s actually easier than I thought it would be.  I used a tracing of a face, so how hard is that?  Start with the lightest colors and work your way up.  She is actually not finished as I will do  more highlighting and shading on her and I haven’t painted the eyebrows yet, but I think she is a pretty cool redhead.  This was painted using aloe vera gel mixed with the inks, a trick from the ever cool Judy Coates Perez.

She has red sparkles in her hair too….I’m going to share how that was done in a minute.

Here is the fish I painted using Tsukineko inks.  At the Bloomington show, someone reminded me of something I had wanted to make a sample of…I simply added it to my fish sample…

Bo-Nash bonding agent is a fusible that comes in a can and you sprinkle it like salt.  It even looks like salt!  So I sprinkled it in some places on the water and in the redhead’s hair, then laid some foil over it, heated it with an iron…and voila!  Sparkling sprinkles!  This is very fun.  And I sell the Bo-Nash fusible and the foil, so call me or email if you want some. I think I will start putting sparkles on lots of stuff now…this is just way too easy.

Discoveries…

I get plumb silly with myself when I make an exciting (to me anyway) discovery while I’m doing art. Remember this piece of paper cloth? It was the piece I did the tutorial on (see sidebar link).  I am finding this paper/cloth with metallic paint on it notoriously difficult to photograph.  It looks like blotches of paint when it really has a nice warm color all over it.

I decided to make a needle case today for a friend of mine out of this paper/cloth.  I layered it and quilted leaves and hearts on it.  As on the last one I made (see tutorial) I colored in the leaves with Tsukineko Fabrico marker #165 Pine.  The ink is transparent which is a wonderful asset because it doesn’t totally cover all those luscious designs on the papers below.  The heart quilting could barely be seen. Coloring them posed a greater challenge to me because the garnet and orange markers make a pretty solid look, which was not what I wanted. (To see what I mean, see the Tutorial–one of the needlecases has hearts that are painted with the marker and left to dry.) On a whim, I colored a heart with the Garnet #125  and Autumn Leaf #153, but instead of letting it dry, I smudged it with my finger…PERFECT!  I kept doing this to all of the hearts with both colors.  Results? A luscious look full of depth…and you can see the hearts but  they blend softly and don’t  stand out.  Something so simple…

I’m so pleased with how this turned out!