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.
- They do have a wonderful opaque quality that allows you to use light over dark.
- The best tool to use to apply them with is a very stiff brush.
- The painting technique is much closer to scrubbing then painting.
- 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.
- Mixing colors worked best as 1 swipe on the black and 2 swipes on the red paintstick (see my comment above).
- If you don't like the results, let it dry and paint over. (can be repeated as needed! LOL)
- They work very well with stencils.
- They work poorly as fabric monographics--just not wet enough.
