A TECHNIQUE DRIVEN Blog dedicated to mastery of surface design techniques. First we dye, overdye, paint, stitch, resist, tie, fold, silk screen, stamp, thermofax, batik, bejewel, stretch, shrink, sprinkle, Smooch, fuse, slice, dice, AND then we set it on fire using a variety of heat tools.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Recycling mistakes, scraps and offcuts

Mags Ramsay here with my last post on using acrylic paints on fabric. I  ran out of time to tell you about my monoprinting experiments but I thought I'd finish up by showing you some projects using  offcuts from acrylic painted fabric and quilts. I love working from scraps-somehow they're more inspiring and liberating than cutting into pristine fabric and I keep a separate basket for all the offcuts when I trim quilts down to size. 

In this case I'd been experimenting with using masking tape shibori stencils on photos of doors to give the effect of woodgrain. I ended up with quite a few offcuts cutting this down from a square to rectangle. Neatening them up and sewing them to other strips using a wide zig zag, the resulting small journal quilt(below) is I think more interesting than the original! 



 I used this technique with strips sometimes only a cm wide to make bookwraps. The advantage of the acrylic paint on the surface of the fabric is that it make the object slightly water resistant - excellent for bags and phone covers too. The sketching bag below that I made from an early disaster  when I applied too much paint .

My second quilt for Cwilt Cymru 'Connection' exhibition 'red remnants' was  by necessity made from offcuts of  the 3 other quilts I'd repurposed from an old red and white quilt - my original idea hadn't worked and with a tight deadline it was pulled together very quickly.


 And there was just enough crumbs left  from the scraps to make a few small pieces as samples and mounted on canvas for sale.

This series of 4 quilts repurposed from an old red and white quilt through painting with acrylics and stitch sum up my progress so far using these techniques. Thanks for joining me , I'm looking forward to the  next challenge. 


8 comments:

  1. It was such a great pleasure to read your posts and tutorials, thank you so much for a month of sharing!

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  2. Thank you Mags for an amazing month of inspiration!!

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  3. thanks Mags for all the many postings and information contained in them. I must try and be more adventurous

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  4. The blog is always informative and fun but I have to say this month with Mags has kept me on the edge of my seat waiting for the next installment. Brava!

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  5. Such an inspiring month. Thank YOU!

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  6. I have been folowing your postings with interest. My machine skips stitches when sewing over fabric painted with acrylics and wondered if you ran into this problem?

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  7. Mags
    Thank you for a very inspiring month.

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