You know, for a first effort at painting on cloth, I'm pretty chuffed with this result!  I was just kind of playing with the paint on the cloth, trying to figure out what it would do - not really trying to achieve anything in particular, so when the "plain" cloth as it was, was so clearly meant to be this ...


all I needed were my charcoal sticks (the bottom row in the pic above) and some pastels (top middle section).


And of course, some thread!




As I added the charocal and pastels to the piece and it revealed itself more fully to me, I thought about time.  How it moves, how we think we are standing still in it, and yet it changes us without our even knowing, moving us along to a place that's new.  If we resist that movement, standing firm in the place we've claimed, it will wear us down until we no longer exist.


But if we embrace it, let it take us where it will; we will all be made softer, purer with age ... and the kindness of erosion.

So, I've continued to work with fabric paint, this time without the soy wax.  I ended up with this:



But I didn't leave it like that of course, I went to work on it with the tools you see under it in my drafting table (yes, those would be fugitive media items!)....




and after some judicious application of charcoal and pastels, I painted over it with the 50/50 blend of base extender and hung it up to dry.  Finished piece tomorrow!


And as for the winner of the tote bag and the name that quilt contest:

Shimmerwood Forest wins!  Email me at kit.lang.ltd@gmail.com with your colour choices and your snail mail address!



And Ms Lottie - you too win a prize, only because you had me giggling so hard.  I very nearly named the quilt "Robert" because it tickled me so much!

So you win one of my little lunch bags - they're plastic lined with a drawstring top and button closure.





Let me know what colourway you'd like at the same email address above.

Congrats to the winners!

But as always happens when I add beading, I didn't like it when it was done. It didn't add anything and in fact, I think took away from the lovely hand-dyed fabrics

Hey, speaking of those fabrics, they're the ones from THIS series of posts.  But back to the beads, I never like them when I add them.  I think I'm just not a bead kind of girl.  Which is pretty shocking, given how much of a magpie I am.



But speaking of shiny things, something I did add and love was a little gold at the tips of the petals and to highlight some of the lines/veins in them.



I also used ordinary gel pens to add a little more definition with a good result,

And the final touch was to add some script with this Micron pen,



Which is a poem I wrote a couple of years ago:


alone .

I wished I knew,
and felt lonely for a home I never had.

Kit Lang (c) 2008

When I first made the flower, I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but as soon as I combined it with my hand-dyed fabrics, I immediately "saw" my poem, and knew that it would reflect the beauty and warmth of Lishanti's version of "home"; while the dark shadows of the purples and lilacs expressed my longing for one like hers.

In a way, I'm sorry that this piece is just a journal quilt (or "sketch" as I call them); because it feels like a bit of a waste to have used those fabrics that I loved so much.  On the other hand, because it is a sketch, there's so much room for development, so I could do a series that would evolve - both the techniques and the story.

This piece also caused a fair amount of acrimony in our household - both because of it's subject matter and BSP's firm assertion that "art should be pretty". BSP added that no one would want something "so depressing" to hang in their home. (!)

After a couple of days, we agreed to disagree, and I'm sure you'll see me revisit this subject again in the future. With or without BSP's stamp of approval. ;)

Yesterday, we were talking about fugitive media.  The piece I was working on was hanging up to dry, and while it was doing so, I started working with some charcoal pastels.


For those of you not familiar with them, this is what they look like. For those of you who are, be happy in your knowledge. ;)   In front of them are a couple of charcoal pencils.

(I apologize in advance for the quality of these photos - I was working outside on a beautiful fall day and the sun was either shining so brightly on my work that it was impossible to get good photos, or it was leaving me over the hours. )

Last month's technique at And Then We Set It On Fire (a group surface design blog I'm part of) was Fugitive Media - where you use items normally meant for paper, on fabric.


I started with this piece of fabric I had dyed with procion MX dyes back in May. This was my second attempt at producing a mandella.
I thought it looked quite a bit like a flower, so I decided to use this piece to produce a flower using fugitive media.  The first thing I did was....