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STITCH THEN PAINT Posted on 28 Sep 17:22 , 0 comments


This last July at our retreat in Sisters Ruth Bass was our fearless leader as we played with some of her artbox supplies. The concept: Stitch It Then Paint it. If you've been following along for any length of time you will have read several different posts and had some journal peeks as I explore this process.

Some conclusions ...

Fabrics: PFD (prepare for dye) or batiks works best. It's the high thread count that helps achieve most consistent results as well as having a luminous quality creating a reflective property to your art piece. Up until this time I've been playing and exploring techniques trying to "develop my hand" with muslin as a foundation. Looking back, I say, "Jump in and go for it!" The quality of your supplies really makes a difference in the final outcome. Perceptions can be skewed with a less than quality foundation material and supplies, and in the end you'll probably spend less if you start right off with good paints, fabrics, and other color mediums.

Paints: I love the Stewart Gill paints  which are available from Artist Cellar. My favorites are Colourise: fully saturated color ... and ...  METAMICA: yummy metalics ... and what a very soft hand when the project is all finished.

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... our inspiration and eye candy while Ruth explained her project process from beginning to end ...
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... Ruth's artbox ... our hands itching to dig in and experiment, explore and play ...
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... Ruth does a demo on the dye process while explaining the different products available for this process ...
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... our play table ...

As you can see we played with other coloring agents ... fabric ink markers, colored pencils, Shiva oil paint sticks, and a couple of different options for simple fabric dye techniques.

The bottom line: the best part about our mini-workshop was the sharing amongst all the members of our group as we set aside time and gave ourselves permission to play. It was so easy to paint our already-stitched-out designs I might yet have a Baltimore Album quilt ... just paint it rather than doing all the applique ??? Hmmmm ... I know - not sure there would be much of a time-savings but it's fun to think about it the possibilities.