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Cushions!

 made these for my oldest Son, David as a Christmas gift. 

He asked me about this time last year if I could do these, he had seen similar ones online but knew his mum could probably make them :)

I considered different options but decided on this one.

I made 3 cushion pads from two new pillows.

Then 3 simple envelope covers from cream calico.

Stencils of adhesive vinyl were cut with the Silhouette Cameo and stuck to the corner of each one

next I used a plain black fabric crayon

 next I iron fixed on reverse and removed the vinyl stencil

I stitched another border around each cushion cover for a more finished look.

Day 3 ~ more to show

Duh! Moment
I cant believe I have gotten this far with the panels and pondered over the whole heat setting process only to read in the instructions for the watercolour dyes that you have to wash them out right away and that once dry they are indeed permanent . . .lol
(me! the person who is always telling folk off for not reading instructions!)

Oh never mind I'm still having fun!

after dinner last night I decided to continue with the painting and managed to get the backgrounds on all four of them done.

 You can see the running and overlapping layers and attempted cover ups mainly in the two blue themed flower pieces but I like them.

I think the peach and yellow/green backgrounds turned out pretty well.
there are some lines from where they have been hung over the airer overnight I didnt want to hang them out on the line last night as the forcast wasn't good I woke up to horrible rain this morning so made the right decision there!

The little flower sample and 3 others...just to use up the leftover paint,
 it's always nice to have hand dyed fabric on hand for little projects.
I decided not to use batik wax on them in the end, the process involves ironing forever to get the wax out and I didn't want to spend too much time doing this. I'm aiming to have this quilt finished or at least at the binding stage by Saturday.

All ironed (to fix the crayon) and ready to go ......

it's time to sew !



Day 2 ~ going in with the paint!

I have been trying to find more information about the Jovi Softywax fabric crayons but there doesn't seem to be a lot out there in way of tutorials, or techniques.

I have been using fabric transfer crayons for years but the Jovi ones are different the colours are truer, not vibrant like the transfer ones, they are nice to work with, soft and high in pigment, I just want to know a little more about them but I will just have to experiment.

So today I'm going in with the paint!
Although I have a batik pot set up and ready to go I'm still looking for quicker easier ways to do these panels, rather than covering them with wax. So I started with a little test piece, it occurred to me as I was sketching this up with the pencils and the crayons that both the crayons and the watercolour dyes require a heat fix

so I painted the little sample, you can see the wet spreading but not so much of the colour

so happy with that I started on the first panel, I figured I could control the paint a bit better on a larger scale and dry the edges as I go along to prevent further seepage

I could then heat fix the areas I want to keep and wash the rest away before doing the background.

I tried this theory out with my little sample and my clover mini iron

I used another piece of fabric to protect my little ironing board, you can see some of the dye from the crayon did transfer.

but what I didn't think about was the heat from the hair dryer, which fixed the areas that had run !

I had already used it on the top areas of the panel so I will just have to wait and see how it goes

 I continued on with the painting

 did the whole panel with as much control as possible without using the hairdryer

 I shall let it dry now, naturally

on the washing line, before deciding how to proceed,
 I'll probably wax around the edges next to get the background painted.

A break for lunch and I'll begin the next panel, I'm not too fussed really if there are runs and its not perfect, that's watercolour! I'm not aiming for perfection, just some nice colourful panels, I'm just happy see how they work out