Our Love Story

I spent the first 30 years of my quilting life cutting large fabric pieces into small fabric pieces and then sewing them back together.  I spent the next few years sewing the scraps back together into fabric pieces large enough to quilt.  Now I am interested in surface design techniques that will allow me to minimize the cutting and sewing back together stages of the process.  This year in the Interpret This! I want to focus on making small whole cloth quilts using a variety of surface techniques. 

My first piece--Our Love Story--will be revealed this afternoon on Interpret This! (see above for the link).  Here is a small piece of it to encourage you to see the rest.  The primary technique I used for this project was painting with oil paintsticks.  I learned a lot.  Here  are a few of the things I want to remember for next time I use oil paintsticks.

1. They do have a wonderful opaque quality that allows you to use light over dark.
2. The best tool to use to apply them with is a very stiff brush. 
3. The painting technique is much closer to scrubbing then painting.
4. Getting the oil on the brush works best for me by brushing the tip of the oil paintstick directly.  I tried various other palette options but wasn't happy with them.
5. Mixing colors worked best as 1 swipe on the black and 2 swipes on the red paintstick (see my comment above).
6. If you don't like the results, let it dry and paint over. (can be repeated as needed!  LOL)
7. They work very well with stencils.
8. They work poorly as fabric monographics--just not wet enough.