I was watching a video where Jenny Grant, a mixed media artist from Sweden, https://www.jennygrantart.com/ was using a credit card to push paint through a stencil onto paper. It made me curious about trying the same method on fabric. I have used acrylic paint on fabric before but thought I would try out some PROfab Transparent Paint I had purchased a while back and never gotten around to playing with. I’ve been making 12” x 12” size quilts to donate as fund raisers for a quilt guild I belong to called Contemporary QuiltArt Association https://www.contemporaryquiltart.com/. They are a nice size to be able to try out new techniques. I searched through my stencils and found this large one. Surprise, surprise it reminds me of my tile quilts. Right up my alley!

I have been using a fabric called Radiance for my tile quilts. It is a fabric made by Robert Kaufman and is a 45% silk/55% cotton blend. I like that it is shiny and puffs up quite nicely to form what I call the grout in between the fabric tiles once they are quilted down. I used two different colors of blue for this one. This was my third sample. I kept smudging paint onto the edges so I decided to put masking tape around the edges of the stencil before painting to try to keep the sides free of paint, but then I was having trouble pulling the tape and the stencil off the fabric. Next time I’ll tape the fabric down first and see if that helps.

Next, I copied the stencil onto heavy butcher type paper so I could number the pieces. These would become my pattern pieces. I wanted to make more than one sample, so I wanted to be able to reuse the pieces. Once numbered, I took a photo of it to keep as my reference master.

 

I cut my fabric patterns out smaller than the painted shapes so I would still see the paint behind the fabric. I cut these out using an Xacto knife. Not very big pieces!

I just started playing with colors that spoke to me. I seemed to focus mostly on fabrics that had circles or dots on them.

Here is the finished 12” x 12” quilt. I fused the fabric pieces onto the painted areas and then quilted them. I found that the PROfab paint was much easier to quilt over than acrylic paint and had a much softer hand as well. I’m a convert! It was a fun experiment and hopefully it will sell at our fundraiser. The exhibition is called Big/Little and we are to make a 12” x 12” quilt and a larger quilt for our entries into the show. I think I will now make my own stencil for the larger quilt and use this same method. I like how the paint peaks out behind the fabric.

Here is another one where I had used black and red PROfab paint. I used the same stencil and got to reuse all my numbered cut out templates for the fabric pieces. This one was really smeared around the edges so I had to put additional Radiance around the edges of it to try to clean it up a bit.

I am trying to educate myself about the Black Lives Matter movement and found myself working through some of the emotions that came bubbling up. What I am reading today is much different from the American history I was taught when I was in school and I find all of it quite disturbing.

It’s not bright and cheery like the first one. I’m not sure I will offer it up for my guild’s fundraiser. What do you think?

As a footnote, I had mentioned in my last post that I was going to fix my dog’s eyes on my Saint Koko quilt. Well, that has not happened yet. Maybe by my next post!

Stay safe!     Tesi Vaara