More Design Excitment

The second day of our class at Quilters Dream focused on using thicked dyes and monoprinting with a variety of tools including carved rollers, texture plates and pencils. Students worked hard and had fabulous results:

Shirley uses thickened dyes with texture plates and a brayer.

Sharon is colouring with Inktense pencils to fill in areas of her design.

Lynnette has great success with carved rollers to create repeating layers of design with two colours of thickened dyes.

Kathy has used a different carved roller to lay design on her fabric.

Soy Wax Batik in Edmonton!

We've had an exciting time at the Quilters Dream in Edmonton for three days of screen, plate and mono printing, plus deconstructed printing and much more. I had many enthusiastic and dedicated students!
Here are some students working on their soy wax batik projects.

Lynette has painted her fabrics with dye solution after applying the coloured wax.

Jackie is getting ready to use a dye solution.

Shirley is explaining her technique to Darlene, the store manager.

Luba has applied the coloured wax with a spong roller. Have a look below for her fabulous design with coloured wax and dye solution. Exciting colours ready for steaming!

Have you had a chance to use soy wax? Its a wonderful product for an exciting technique!

Shattered Angles in St. Albert

I'm in Edmonton right now, doing some teaching. I had a lovely day with the St Albert Quilt Guild, I'm envious that they had their own dedicated space in the local Civic Centre, a lovely room with great lighting and space.
Here are some of the ladies with their Shattered Angles projects:

One Word Wednesday

Spikey

Sketchbook Idea-Circles

A lecture by Jane Dunnewold at the Washington SDA Symposium reminded me of some designs I had done in my sketchbook.
Jane discussed using imagery as a tool and how one can used limitless versions of an element or image to explore design.
I went back to my sketchbook and looked at some images I had used to make Thermofax screens. What I liked about these images is that while they are pretty much just textural, the shape, in this case, a circle, is what defines them, not by a line around to enclose but rather the empty space around to frame them. The negative or open space surrounding them takes on more importance than one might suppose.
This is a great exercise to try-find a simple shape to work with and draw it as a faint line in pencil. Fill the shape with marks such as dots, wiggles, straight or crosed lines. Erase the pencil lines and see the images emerge. What can you develop?

One Word Wednesday

Lemon House

New Ironing Surface

Only quilters could get excited about ironing surfaces....right? I'm starting a gradual redesign of my studio and we took a weekend trip to IKEA to pick up a few things. I bought a small kitchen island with wheels on one end so I can move it around my studio. You can check out the island here at the IKEA site: http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/80035920/

Don't you love the drawers and storage shelves too???

I added three layers of batting and two layers of muslin (separately so I can change the muslin when it gets dirty). And I'm thrilled with my 680 sq. inches of pressing surface!!!!

One Word Wednesday

Hanging Out

Happy 4th Blog-versary!

I just realized that its been four years since I began to blog....so many ideas and inspiration. Creativity and design have been a huge part of my life and I love to share with others through teaching, writing and more.
This is what I wrote four years ago:

Hi everyone,
I've become a blogger...its true! My children would say "about time, Mum!" I hope this is going to be easy...I'm not much of a techie/computer savvy person, so we'll see how this goes.
Welcome to my page and let's get started..... I'm hoping to post every couple of days, keeps me on track and focused. I'm hoping for lots of pictures to put up, its good to read stuff, but much more fun to "see". Just have to figure out how to do that!

Well, hasn't technology changed even in that short a space of time, now I use Facebook and YouTube as well, who would have thought?

So to celebrate I'm offering 15% off anything (before shipping) in my store at http://www.fabricimagery.com/ Just enter code QC11 and you'll automatically get that 15% off at the checkout. How amazing is that??? Act now, because the sale ends on February 29th!

Online Quilt Expo!

If you can't get to a quilt conference or want to try an event as close as your computer, how about joining hundreds of others and attend the "Inspired To Quilt" Online Quilt Expo March 7-10th!!!
Lots of great teachers and events to check out, you do need to register tho!

Why not join me and see what fun it can be!