More Fabric Prints

Well I am still experimenting with fabric prints while I finish off the blocks for my quilt prints. I am working on two quilt patterns at the moment. One is the Rayon Dress Quilt and the second is tentatively called Fancy Squares Quilt. When I look at that title on this page, it looks pretty bad, so I'll likely change it.


My problem is I keep on adding blocks for the quilt prints and now I am starting to dread the actual printing as I know that it always takes longer than I anticipated. I am preparing these two prints for a show in March, which sounds like oodles of time, but...... I know it really isn't (the day job takes up my days after all). So getting sidetracked by the smaller prints is not the best strategy, but I can't help myself.

These prints use and reuse a series of small blocks. Some are many years old and were used in editioned prints. Others I have cut specifically for this series of prints and now I have a box full of them. Selecting the blocks is as bad as trying to decide what to wear to work:

- Out comes the box.
- Out spill all the blocks.
- Some of the blocks are put down in this or that combination and considered.
- Hmmm, well lets take these away and try those instead.
- Ouch, that didn't work.
- If I do this instead of that, does it look better?
- Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, maybe......
- OK, just move this over here, switch this one for that one and...
- Well this might work, but what if I move....

You can see how it goes and I haven't even thought about colours yet.

Since these prints are exploratory in nature I am not printing editions, just one of each and listing them in my Etsy shop.

Running Horse Plaid

As a bit of a break from working on my large blocks for the quilt prints, I have printed up a number of smaller images based loosely on imaginary fabric patterns. This has also given me the opportunity to play around with transparent inks, which I have rarely done. I find my Daniel Smith transparent base absolutely impossible to work with. I think I should talk to someone at DS about that. My other DS inks are great, so why isn't this one??

So, for the moment, I am trying out Setswell Compound. It makes the ink feel really greasy and it takes ages to dry, but the colours become very transparent. There is also a bit of a problem with ink 'squish' around the edges of the blocks, but who said life was perfect.

The Running Horse Plaid is a pretty jaunty little print. Well, it is not that small - 8"x10"image size - on BFK Rives Lightweight paper. I have all sorts of small blocks, so I sifted through them and came up with the ones I used for this print. OK, I did have to make the long blocks (printed in orange here). There was nothing particularly planned about this print. I just laid down the background yellow and then positioned various blocks on top of it until I had an idea of what I would print next. The colours were actually quite random as well. I had little smidges of ink saved from my quilt proofs and I just used those, watered down immensely with the Setswell.

All in all, not a bad print - to my mind. It makes me think of a sunny kitchen, with this pattern on an old piece of oilcloth on the kitchen table. Part of an imaginary childhood out of a storybook I suppose. But the print is real, so who is to say that that kitchen didn't exist sometime, somewhere.