Screen Printing and Painting

We had an awesome time yesterday - a small group of us me at my art room and we played with fabrics and paints. I never take enough pics, here are a few:

Rona, I never took a photo of your printed fabrics, can you put some up on your blog to share, please?

 

For a horse lover :-)

 

Rona had also brought her fabric painting supplies and showed us the method she had used for her painted quilts - that was amazing! 

For me this has opened a whole new world of possibilities! There have been a lot of ideas swirling around in my head, but applique can be limiting, some of the finer detail is hard to 'cut out'. With this method which came from LuAnn Kessi, you change a photograph to a black and white sketch in your photo editing software and print it onto a piece of freezer paper backed fabric (no other treatment required). Similar to painting by numbers, you paint on this fabric with fabric with fabric paint watered down with aloe vera gel. The added bonus is that your painting smells very nice! You then sandwich and quilt :-) Even my DH was intrigued and looked for pictures from our hometown and surrounding area. I can see a series developing...

 

Another really cool experiment yesterday was this helio print:

Painted with a translucent fabric paint wash, then put in the sun with leaves and some weeds on top - magical!

So where to from here with Screen Printing???

Screen printing designs onto items is fun but not enough for me. Screen printing is somewhat limited in size as I have not found an easy method yet to quickly create repeat prints, so slightly smaller than fat quarter is what I can achieve at the moment - but then I have bought lots of fqs over time lol. I want to try combining screen printing with dying to see if I can create my own personal line of fabrics that I can use in my quilting. So right now I have one screen coated with photoemulsion and after I have finished here I will put it out in the sun to develop (my other developed screens were all done by someone else, so keep your fingers crossed it works!). If and when it's done, I can print fqs with this and later go and dye them. Hmmm, really no time to go back to work lol

One of my biggest frustrations at the moment is the lack of access to resources, I feel very much like "living in the wobs" right now after I ran around all through Whangarei (1h sth. of here) and no one even knew what photoemulsion was! I did find it online, in New Zealand, so I'll add a page with supplier details to this blog - please let me know who else I can add :-)

There is another post waiting to be written about my niece's quilt - will post it this weekend :-)
Happy sewing!