Painting...

The second class I took at the Long Beach Quilt Festival was with Polkey Bolton the editor of Quilting Arts Magazine and it was gel mono printing. [Polkey is really nice and and a great instructor, if you get a chance to take a class with her, I recommend it, you'll have fun "playing"]  We used fabric paints and a gelatin base to paint fabrics.   We used a new product call http://www.gelliarts.com/ which made the process really easy as we didn't need to use real gelatin.   We covered the gelatin base with fabric paints using a Brayer or a sponge brush.  A sponge brush gives you much more freedom as you can apply the paint to specific areas of your Gelli.  Each technique gave different results.  I really liked mixing the paints and creating different textures with the brush.  Some of the painted surfaces we imprinted with various found objects or rubbing plates (plates usually used with paintstiks) which design was transferred to the fabric.  Here's a sample of some of my printed fabrics.  After I got home, I did some machine embroidery on a few.

 

It was a lot of fun and with my leftover yardage, I'd like to make a continuous 2+ yards for a dress for my niece.  If you are not going to wash your fabric, you can basically use any type of paint.  If you are going to wash your fabric, be sure to use fabric paints and heat set when paint is dry.  You can heat set by running an iron over it, or as I did, tossing it in a hot dryer for 20+ minutes.

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