Crazy for Hibiscus…

February 24, 2013February 24, 2013 MaryLeave a comment

Maybe it’s because I find it easy to draw a hibiscus? This week has been filled with that Hawaiian beauty, and I am not tired of it yet. It started on Wednesday when I joined the “Fab Five” (my practicing art quilt group) for a day of exploration. We were focused on stenciling, stamping and generally creating designs with all sorts of tools… even gelatin. The most fun for me was the glue gun. A piece of parchment paper served as a base and a hot glue gun (careful now!) created a hibiscus design that I could use as a stencil or stamp. It is white when first completed… this one has been used to create a design and retains some of the paint. It can be trimmed and is so easy to work with. Hope the Off the Wall Friday group enjoys seeing this process below.

After quickly applying some fuchia setacolor paint to a piece of muslin and letting it dry, I held the glue stencil securely on the fabric and dabbed paint around it. The result has a batik quality. I’m eager to try my hand at a few more of these. Good times.

A friend, neighbor, and excellent teacher also has some lessons that many of you might enjoy. Lyric Kinard is teaching her Bead It Like You Mean It class right now. Get on over to her blog and have some fun while you learn how to use beads on fabric. Her instructions have provided me with hours of pleasure, both in class and from watching her DVDs. Using some of her methods, I will be adding some beads to my hibiscus. She also creates thermofaxes, so I decided to see if I could use the glue stencil to create a couple of thermofax designs. I put the glue stencil on the scanner and used my photo editing software to work with it. Here are the results – a positive and negative thermofax. Thermofaxes are created from black and white images placed on a thermofax printer.

I still have the hibiscus quilt on my design wall. I worked on the leaves this week, and I hope to have all of the painting completed in only a few more sessions. After drawing a pattern on freezer paper and pressing it in place on the quilt top, I applied two colors of green setacolor opaque paint. There will still be a light green color that will trace the veins which are now bright pink- applied with a sponge. Touches of the pink will peek through. It is exciting to see it take shape…. still much to do.

Guess it’s been a productive week! Hope to catch some more activity happening over at Off the Wall Friday! Come along and check it out with me!

A new addition….

February 16, 2013 Mary2 Comments

Quite by accident, I rescued a Handi Quilter II from a Good Will delivery this week. A neighbor called to say she was about send hers away, so I decided to set it up and give it a try. I realize that the new Handi Quilters are up to at least #24, so this is one of the old originals. I have to put my Janome machine onto a platform and steer it around, but still it really isn’t all that difficult. I won’t use it to echo quilt unless I gain a great deal of skill, but it works great for bed quilts and donation quilts. So, for today and tomorrow, I am just learning to use the HQII and trying to complete the US Map donation quilt for Project Linus. Then, I will happily return to working on my hibiscus applique and painted quilt. The blossoms are completed and I will get the leaves and center part of the quilt painted early this week…. hopefully in time to show the center of the quilt to you next week. Then, I hope to try printing some light designs on the background before I sandwich it and start echo quilting. Check out what others are doing on Off The Wall Fridays!

Off the Wall Fridays – Hibiscus

February 11, 2013February 11, 2013 Mary4 Comments

Hi Everyone,

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled out a quilt that I started in about 1975 when we were stationed in Hawaii. I loved the Hawaiian quilts I saw there and did complete one queen sized quilt in that style. A special group of Air Force wives would gather to help each other lay out and baste the quilts. It took more than one person because the designs were cut on the bias, and we had to be so careful not to stetch them out of shape. We would push together a bunch of dining tables at the Officer’s Club, spread the quilts out on them, and then crawl up and baste the design to the background. When the applique was completed in a few weeks, we would repeat the process and baste the applique and background, batting and backing.

Then I started a Hawaiian quilt for each of my kids…. they were two and three years old! What was I thinking? When we returned to the mainland, those two quilts were tucked safely away. Since I have wanted to try painting on a quilt, I gave it a try on the hibiscus design that I had hand appliqued all those many years ago. I also didn’t want to be bound by the rules of Hawaiian design – only two colors, all done by hand, and echo quilted. So I decided to follow some of the rules, but to branch out and see what happened. Here is a picture of the quilt with one of the blossoms painted. It isn’t completed…. the outer parts of the blossom need to be painted in a darker pink/peach. Once the painting is done, I plan to machine embroider / thread paint on top of the painted areas, and then echo quilt the background. We’ll see what happens in the weeks ahead. I have used setacolor transparent paints. To complete the outer sections of the blossom, I will use setacolor opaque paints because the lighter transparent color doesn’t cover the dark pink fabric adequately.

I’m just barely squeaking into Off the Wall Fridays…. hope to get out there to see what everyone else has been doing … soon.