Ashmead's Kernal

For my last quilt in the 2015 series I have continued to design and develop in Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 (which happily continues to work well under Windows 10). I was able to pick and photograph apples from the tree in my garden for this piece so it really does feel like it is completely my own home grown piece of work.

As the challenge for this piece is 'Reflection' I decided to play with the Reflection Effects in the software. There are so many variables to try that in the end I just rolled the dice until I came up with several pictures that I liked. Then I just chose my two favourites and added a Distortion Ripple Effect to the lower one. Examples below...

Reflection pattern

Reflection pattern with ripple

Reflection kaleidoscope

Reflection kaleidoscope with ripple

Once I had settled on the final two background pictures I superimposed my apples over them and I printed them out on TAP and ironed this onto white cotton. It is difficult to make the joins disappear and I used watercolour pencils to try and hide any small gaps. 

I applied Golden Soft Gel Medium with a small paintbrush and let it dry and then ironed on gold and silver foil. 

Finally I dusted lightly with some pearly and bronzey markal sticks.

The piece was then ironed onto felt with mistyfuse and quilted with YLI machine quilting cotton in Dusk.

It might interest you to know that I am not very good at visualising which is why I find PaintShop Pro so useful in the design process. Unless I have done something before I cannot imagine what it is going to look like so I do a lot of  'what if', trial and error and test pieces along the way to finalising my piece.

Pineapple Emerging

 I decided to continue with my method of designing in PaintShop Pro with the aim of producing something very bright and rather abstract. I eventually settled on a very simplified design of a pineapple set against a background of kiwi fruit cross sections. I love fresh pineapple, but am allergic to it and get a more extreme reaction to it every time I eat it.

I started with a simple drawing of a pineapple which I scanned in and then I found a good picture of kiwi fruit. I manipulated the kiwi fruit picture and then changed the colour of the pineapple and the leaves to differentiate it from the background. 

 I used TAP for the lettering on my last quilt, but I have never used it for a whole quilt and I have never had to match and join sections of a picture onto fabric. It’s quite difficult and I did mess it up a bit. I have since worked out how to crop accurate section for printing and to join them together with masking tape before ironing it all on to the fabric in one big go.

My intention was to do some dense quilting over the background in a light colour to knock it back and make the pineapple pop out, but this did not work as effectively as I had hoped. To rectify this I had to reinforce the stitched black outline of the pineapple with a black pen and then go over the background with a pearl-white Markal stick. If I'd had time to practice I would have faded out the background before printing it.

Reverse view

Rosehip Seeds

I wanted to produce something in the American Art Deco style for this challenge. My original idea was to design a seed packet which fits in with my theme of fruits and seeds quite nicely. As I progressed though, it seems to have metamorphosed into a poster.

I created the final design in PaintShop Photo Pro X3 using vector graphics and then used this as a template for the piecing.

The rosehip was made separately using a reverse appliqué method and then attached to the background as a whole.

All the fabric except the black is hand dyed by me as per Helen Deighan’s method for graduated effects from her book Dyeing in Plastic Bags.  

The lettering was achieved by printing onto Artist Transfer Paper (ATP) and ironing this on.

I decided not to do lots of free machine embroidery on this piece as I wanted to keep it clean and simple.

This closeup shows how the yellow fabric has been left around the seeds during the process of  reverse appliqué

Green Pears

The theme I have chosen to work with for the year is “Fruits and Seeds”. It would have been so easy to simply incorporate a bit of green foliage for this challenge, but I wanted to do a bit more than that. I took photographs of pears and, after much experimentation, created this image using digital manipulation in PaintShop Photo Pro X3. I needed the image to be clean and simple so that it would work with the repetition. I then generated several colour gradients which all moved from green to another colour e.g. green – yellow, green – magenta, etc. I coloured each pear in from a different gradient. It was printed out using an inkjet printer on white cotton poplin coated with inkAID. The design enabled me to work within the limitations of an A4 printer – no awkward joins to deal with. The backing is felt and interfacing. The quilting is a straightforward free machine meander stitch using a variety of Isacord 40 threads. I chose to edge the piece with a machined blanket stitch.

Sunprinting

Sunprinting is a bit of a misnomer for this technique. It gives the impression that the fabric paint is somehow reacting to the sun. It’s not. It is actually the high ambient temperature that is important. I do sunprinting in my conservatory on hot summer days and shadows from the struts in the roof fall across my fabric, but have no detrimental effect. The fact that I am indoors with no breath of wind also means that I can use very delicate leaves and flowers in the process and they won’t be blown away. You could do this in the sauna if you really wanted!

The first thing I do is to collect cow parsley leaves and any other plant that takes my fancy as soon as they appear in spring. Then I place them all between layers of newspaper, put a big old pile of books on top and press them. This gives me a big stash of shapes and patterns ready to use when the sun comes out.

You will need...

• Plastic sheeting to cover the table.
• Up to three colours of paint. (notes about paint below)
• Three jars or trays.
• Three brushes or sponges.  I use sponge brushes.
• Spray bottle with water.
• White cotton fabric.
• Dishwasher salt or other grainy salt.
• Stencils, pressed leaves etc (more about this below)
• A hot day!

The way I do the sunprinting is as follows...

• I lay out a flat sheet of plastic on my table. It should not have any creases or wrinkles in it as this will affect the end product.
• Choose the paints, I never use more than three colours, and dilute them with water until they are really watery. I use shallow trays for this, but jars will do.
• I cut/tear pieces of white cotton poplin that are about 85cm x 50cm (34” x 20”) max. Lay the fabric out on the plastic and spray it with water so that it is damp, but not soaking.
• Now we’re working against the clock to finish before the fabric starts to dry. Paint the fabric quickly, making sure that the different colours merge into each other.
• When the fabric is covered in colour place the leaves etc all over, making sure that they adhere completely to the wet fabric. This will only work if the leaves lie completely flat against the fabric.
• Now leave the fabric to dry. Do not be tempted to lift up the leaves and peak!
• When it is completely dry peel and brush off the leaves and Voila!

This technique works because everything tends towards equilibrium! The fabric constantly tries to stay equally wet all over, but the exposed parts dry first so they draw the wet paint from the covered parts until there is none left there, leaving the covered area white.

This piece has had dish washer salt sprinkled over it after the placement of the leaves. The salt draws the wet paint and absorbs it, leaving these lovely marks. Always put the salt on last as it will prevent your other items lying flat against the fabric.

This piece had a commercial stencil placed on it and salt sprinkled around the edge. You can easily make your own stencils from 125 micron heavy duty plastic sheeting. I get mine from the DIY store.

Stencil.

This piece was made by swiping the paint on in a crosswise tartan pattern and then concertina folding the fabric roughly in one direction and leaving it until it was about half dry. At this point I concertina folded the fabric in the other direction and left it until it was completely dry. None of this was done with any accuracy. The concertina folds give the fabric hills and valleys and the wet paint is drawn into the valleys by gravity.

These pieces were left to dry in a loosely crumpled state. The first piece also has salt sprinkled on it.

Stencils

You can use any item to leave a mark on the fabric. It will always work provided it will sit flat on the fabric until it is dry. Home made stencils made from heavy duty plastic can be used over and over again, paper stencils may only work once.

Paints

You can use paints that are specially designed for sunprinting such as Pebeo Setacolour Light fabric paint. These are fluid, high pigment paints, but may still need watering down. They leave the fabric surprisingly soft.

If you want to experiment, but don’t want to spend lots of money on new paints then you can use watered down Jacquard Textile Colors or any similar make of paint. Transparent colours work best. I have also successfully used watered down acrylic paints. The last two pieces shown in this post were made with ordinary, inexpensive acrylic paints. Acrylics will have a slight stiffening affect on the fabric, which the fabric paints do not. The high pigment fluid acrylic paints are ideal for this technique. 

Books

My two favourite books on the subject.