You’ve Got to Try this!
Have you seen this book?
It’s called “Quilts of a Different Color,” by Irena Bluhm. This book is a lot of fun; her technique involves free motion quilting a design, and then going back in and coloring inside the lines! The quilts in her book are quite beautiful and most of the quilting is quite formal and symmetric. I’ve seen a number of other quilters use her technique, and they have always followed that same formal and symmetric tone. So…I wondered how this would all pan out if you began with a more freefrom and whimsical design, and here is a sandwich of one that I played with:
Isn’t that fun? I have to tell you it went pretty quickly as well. I didn’t follow her directions to the letter…I am always trying to cut corners and save myself time. I began with a light violet cotton sateen fabric and spray basted a quilt sandwich using warm & white batting. I first stitched my baseline pansy loop-d-loop design in purple thread:
No reason why you couldn’t stop quilting right there and just color this in as is; I just like to hyperquilt and use more than 1 thread. Next, I went back in with gold thread for the hyperquilting, and I like the “ribbon-like” effect this introduces to the loop-d-loop connecting line:
Now doesn’t that just jazz things up a bit? Next, you add color. I used FabriMarkers by DriMark:
Now, here’s a closeup of the colored design BEFORE it went through the wash:
Irena recommends coating your colored areas with textile medium; I did not do that on this sample. Instead, I waited 24 hours to make sure it was totally dry, then I heat set it with my iron. I threw it in the wash and washed it with Tide Laundry soap, and this is what came out:
No bleeding of color but the purple has definitely lightened into a violet. Here’s another sandwich I played with, and it was hyperquilted (in a different way), AFTER the coloring was added. Notice that for this one, I started with a light blue cotton sateen:
(Notice that the entire sandwich never got hyperquilted; I got distracted!) And here’s that sandwich after it went through the same wash:
And here’s one more sample for you…this one was done on 100% cotton fabric and I used Prismacolor colored pencils to add color, then hyperquilted it. I then covered all my colored areas with textile medium to protect them. Notice the coloring is much more subtle here:
That one still hasn’t made it into the wash because I forgot to throw it in, but in theory, that textile medium should give better protection to the coloring…we’ll see!
One more thing…if you like reading blogs, I’ve got one for you to check out. It’s a melding of posts from tons of blogs, so you can read a lot in one sitting. It’s called Quilterblogs.com, and take some time to scroll backwards; there are some wonderful, very detailed tutorials in there! (check out the one on pincushions-they’re cute!)