Romper Room

I've had to snatch bits and pieces of time for projects this week because I'm so busy at work. I also started the Quilt U Painted Fabrics class, so now I'm painting AND dyeing whenever I get a chance. These pics are from this week's lesson, which was about dyeing landscape fabrics--specifically, skies. I don't have a frame or stretcher bars to pin my fabric to when dyeing with a brush, and I've noticed that laying the fabric directly on the plastic results in the "tiny bubbles" effect, as seen on the blue-sky piece. However, the interesting thing is that these bubbles don't show (or are much less obvious) on the back of the piece (or is this the front?), as seen on the gray-sky piece. Anyway, this is handy because sometimes I might want the bubbles, and other times not. In the fabric painting class, the first lesson was about creating a color sampler using the fabric paints. This was really helpful in getting a feel for how the paints behave on the fabric, as well as for figuring out to make lots of tints, shades, and color mixes.

After all this work, though, I just needed some fun. I was going through some of my saved recordings of Simply Quilts, and ran across the episode with Laura Wasilowski creating a fused piece. This just looked like too much fun, so I had to try it. It was like being a kid again, only this time I got to play with sharp scissors and hot irons!