As promised, I spent some time studying my fabric after
round 5. The first thing I decided was
that some of my colors were not as bright as I had hoped for, and I decided to
use some Dye-Na-Flow to over paint the areas.
I have not used Dye-Na-Flow much, but have seen how well it works for
some other fiber artists, so I dug out my yellow, orange and pink. Here is how it looked afterward:
I was very pleased with the increased brightness, and glad I
decided to give it a try! At this point,
I still wasn’t sure how I would use the fabric, so I studied it awhile
longer. Finally, I decided I didn’t want
to cut it up… it was a good candidate for a whole-cloth art quilt. I rummaged around and found I had enough batting,
and a large piece of black hand dyed muslin for the backing. So with not too much else in mind, I set
about to start free-motion quilting. The
first area I stitched was the section just above the middle where the yellow
stripe has black on either side (remember how the dye migrated after I painted
it over the batik?). I just followed the
zigzag design across.
Then I went to the section just below and followed the black
stripes the same way. Next, I outlined
the organic shapes made by using a lotus pod to apply wax. So far, I had been using black thread (which,
by the way, drove me crazy because the thread was slubby and kept breaking!).
When I finished those three sections, I studied the piece a
little. The batik swirls had not come
out too clear, and I thought maybe using contrasting embroidery floss to hand
stitch the design might be fun:
Next, I studied the screen printing I did towards the
bottom. I decided using free-motion to
follow the lines would be best – I really didn’t want to interfere with the
screen design:
Above, the section on
the right has been stitched. I did a
little creative fill-in in some areas where the screen stopped, and will
probably do something similar to join the sections where one print ended and
the next began.
I’m not totally sure yet what will be done to the rest, but
wanted you to get an idea of how I am using the fabric I hope you have enjoyed watching this piece
come together so far, and I also hope you have been inspired to get out the
dyes, paints, wax and whatever else you have waiting to be put to use!
Tomorrow I will be discussing some of the techniques I didn’t
use for this piece that were mentioned in my first post. I have some examples to show you where I have used some, and a challenge for
you as well!
