During a recent visit to the craft store, I stumbled across this interesting product – Krylon Webbing Spray.

You hold the can about 12-18″ above the item to be sprayed which can be fabric, paper or other types of surfaces. You then sweep across the surface as you spray and it comes out of the can kind of like silly string. It then floats onto the surface and adheres and dries.

Way cool – and a great surface design technique. It’s kind of stiff when it dries, but you can sew over it. Fun!

You’ll might remember I started with this design in mind and ended up with this beautiful completed art quilt.

Well I decided to continue in series and now have three lovely little art quilts, each 21″ x 14″.

FLOWERS

LEAVES

POMEGRANATE

As I love to work with elements of nature, each of the quilts has a “nature theme”, and one of my favorite sources of inspiration, apart from photographs, is this great book
4000 Flower & Plant Motifs
which is just full of imaginative and decorative motif designs that you can use as a point of inspiration. Highly recommended if you love working with nature themes!

This was the result of the sample at the last installment:

Now I needed to add a little green because what’s purple and yellow without green? So I added some small machine embroidered leaves around the edges of the stalk and stem to liven things up.

Now for the edges. It would be really easy to simply bind off and finish it at that, but I wanted to give the piece a “soft edge” finish. As I had already used small circles as part of the flower design, I decided to use the circular design to finish the edges. I placed some water soluble stabilizer underneath along the edges (a great application for using up all those small scrappy pieces of stabilizer), then quilted a couple of rows of circles all around the edges – very organic looking.

Then I carefully snipped away the fabric from the outer edges being careful not to cut into the stabilizer.

Using an embroidery hoop to keep the stabilizer taught, I extended the circular stitching onto the stabilizer.

Then I washed away the stabilizer leaving a soft lacy edge.

The final touch was some hand beading to the central design;

and some bead clusters along the edges.

I then mounted the embroidery onto a quilted greenish colored hand-dyed background. The final size is 14″ x 21″. Considering the fabric that I started with, I’m really happy with the results.

I still have a few pieces of hand dyed fabric left over, so I might use them up in a similar fashion over the next month or so.

Here is what’s happening so far:

I took one of the fat quarters with mostly purple color, cut it in half and made a quilt sandwich with some cotton batting in between. I added some free motion quilting for background texture, and then cut some lime green/yellow squares and frayed the edges and pinned in place.

I then cut out a simple flower shape and fused it to the green/yellow square.

I began by adding some free motion embroidery – doodling mostly – and because the stitching is so tiny, I used a hand embroidery hoop to help guide the stitching as well as a spring needle for better visibility.

Sidenote: My favorite hoop is a 7″ hand embroidery spring hoop. It’s very easy to use and the spring insert holds fabric as well as thin quilts, nice and tautly in place. Plus it’s easy to reposition as you’re stitching.

Sidenote: A spring needle is simply a needle with a special wrap-around spring, and a small stopper on the bottom. You use it without a machine foot, and with a hand embroidery hoop and it gives great visibility when you’re working small. You can sometimes find them in your local quilt store, or search online for “spring needle”. They are inexpensive but when the needle dulls, you simply swap it out and refit the spring contraption around the new needle.

More free motion embroidery to fill in the design.

Along the way I added a few simple shapes to represent a stalk and stems for the flowers, and added some simple machine embroidery designs to fill in the space. I’m really liking it so far and think the design would look great on a much larger quilt. I think I’ll add a little more machine embroidery to finish this piece and maybe even make a few more similar size panels using the rest of the fat quarters. I’ll post the finished piece when I’m done.

Sidenote

As a sidenote, some years ago I actually took the time to make a sample folder of dye recipes. This really is a time consuming process because you have to label everything and be very precise about mixing your dyes. However the samples have proved invaluable to me over the years particularly when I need a very specific color or combination of colors. With the dye recipe and sample right at your fingertips, it is extremely easy to reproduce the exact same color.

If you are interested in producing your own sample folder, I highly recommend the book Dyeing To Quilt : Quick, Direct Dye Methods for Quilt Makers by Joyce Mori and Cynthia Myerberg. While I have read a number of good dyeing books, I found this one particularly easy to read and understand, and very easy to follow. It also includes record sheets that you can copy and use to create your sample color runs.

Back to the story

I dyed it using a variegated range of complementary colors which I don’t work with very often, but gave me the perfect color I needed. After I was done I had lots of leftover dye which I never like to waste, so I decided to use it up.

I am very good at experimenting; in fact I love to do it. However when I know the outcome and the results are not good, I usually don’t want to go there again. And if you know anything of color theory, then you know that mixing complementary colors normally results in a “mud” color, usually (but not always) a good thing to avoid.

So here I had six fat quarters and various mixtures of complementary color dye. Will I or won’t I? Ok, let’s do it.

I pre-soaked the fat quarters in some soda ash. I figured they might have half a chance of turning into something useful if the colors took quickly. Then I squished them into a container one at a time, pouring different colors of leftover dye onto each piece as I squished it on top of the next. I was careful to try and not let the dye colors blend together too much, but a certain overlap was inevitable.

The resulting colors were not at all what I expected; the colors in the dye seemed to separate really quickly except for a few areas that turned a “light mud” and are not at all displeasing. The results in fact were a pleasant surprise so now I can’t wait to use the fabric on a project!

The moral of this story

Don’t ever be afraid to try; even if you think you know the outcome. The results just may surprise you.

Results