Technique of the Week #32 - Electroluminescent Wire

Project Hours: 5 hours
Design and Materials: 1 hour
Execution: 4 hours 
To say that I love the electronic convergence of tech and textile is an understatement.  I don't just love it, I LURVE it.  Love love love it.
So when I saw fashion students using electroluminescent wire in garments, I just HAD to try it.  EL Wire is readily available on the internet, and if you saw my little video with Pokey Bolton, you know I found some by typing it into the almighty Google machine to locate some. 
That piece was in my gallery show and some other places, but it was really my trial piece.  I didn't know what to do with it, how to get it to stay in shape, etc.  i have perfected it now, and while I can't give away all my secrets (yet) on how to do it, I know you're all smart folks and can come up with some amazing designs of your own.
Sticking with my octo theme for the year, this little bugger is done with 3 feet of El Wire, and it's an 8 inch piece.  Almost all of the time was spent on shaping and sewing down the wire. It's a flexible tube, not unlike your iPod cord.  So take a look at that cord and imagine bending it into tight corners, etc and you will see the dilemma here. 

But, oh, when it's done, it sure looks pretty all lit up.  The swirled background gives him an eye in shadow when he's lit up.

Technique of the Week #27 - Stuffed Dimensional Appliques

Project Hours: 4 hours
Design and Materials: 1 hour
Execution: 3 hours
I love the work of Kathy York.  She is a quilt artist who can think "outside the box" dimensionally.  She's got two rather "famous" works that have seen publication and exhibition that are dimensional.  The first is Little Fish in a Big City, and th esecond is called Synchronized Swimming.  You can see them here at her website.
I'm not Kathy York, and I'm not going to make a bajillion little fishes to put on my weekly quiltlet.  But I wanted to get a sense of HOW to apply this idea to a quilt surface, and I came up with this stuffed tentacle.  I drew a pattern, added about a third of an inch to each side because I knew stuffing it would draw it upwards, and then sewed the fabric tentacle.  I added yo-yos for suckers.  Pretty cool technique, sewing it down was easy using a variation of a blind hem stitch.  The edge of the background quilt is not wonky, but scanning this stuffed sucker was...
I'm amazed that the cephalopod theme continues strongly so far this year!  It's a fun theme.

Technique of the Week #25 - Screenprinting with Mask Ease

Project Hours: 4 hours
Design and Materials: 1 hour
Execution: 3 hours
The product for this technique is called Mask Ease by Scratch-Art.  This stuff is a vinyl mask that you apply to a prepared screen for screenprinting, and it acts as your resist so you can screen through it.  I have some pictures of the process this time, to explain better.  

I did not have a screen around, so I used some sheer cotton fabric and a wood embroidery hoop that cost me 99 cents.  I wrapped the inner hoop with floral tape to make it sticky and pulled my fabric tight and put glue around the edges once I was sure it was taut.  I then used the circle of the hoop to make my pattern. 

I drew my cuttlefish onto the yellow vinyl surface.  He's going to be reversed in print, so keep that in mind.
Then you cut the vinyl with an X-Acto knife to expose your lines.  I followed the Mask Ease Instructions from here, adhering it to my screen and printing as usual.

One other note is that this needs to be used with good thick print paste or ink, as the large open surfaces can get runny onto fabric.  I'm still not a good screenprinter and I had several runny attempts before I thickened up my print paste. 
I do like this little guy. I wanted him to be a little bigger to fill the space of the quilt a little better, so I think next time I will add borders or get an actual screen for screenprinting or a bigger embroidery hoop.  (It is a cheap alternative)

Technique of the Week #24 - Scratch-A-Print Screenprinting

Project Hours: 3 hours
Design and Materials: 1 hour
Execution: 2 hours

This is was one of two screen printing techniques I tried using a new product.  This product is called Scratch-a-Print2, which I got from Dick Blick.  The idea is that these very thin sheets of tissue paper are wax coated on one side, and you "scratch" your drawing into the front, rubbing the wax off onto some paper underneath and opening up the tissue for your paint to go through.

The size I bought meant that my pieces would be very small, and I could try several designs in one quilt.

I found this stuff super easy to use.  It comes 10 to a pack, and when the directions say to "press hard" do indeed press hard and go over your lines twice to make sure they are opened up.  I had to clean my screen and redraw the lines again, as my first ones were not open enough.

One thing that I did before I printed was to take clear packing tape and tape over the cardboard edges of the screens so that if I tried to wash the screen the cardboard would not disintegrate.

I was able to get a better result not be "screening", but by using a tissue and gently patting the screen ink through the tissue.  Each one was immediately rinsed.  These were the best of my attempts and I know I am not very good at screening.

As you can tell, my "year of the cephalopod" continues, and this is called "Cephalopod Party".  There's a dumbo octopus, a regular octo, a cuttlefish and a squid.  Yay!  I do these designs because I don't have to do much thinking ahead of time, which saves time as I am trying to get myself caught up from my summer hiatus.

Technique of the Week #23 - Multi-part printing or Faux Screenprinting

Project Hours: 5 hours
Design and Materials: 1 hour
Execution: 4 hours


This week's technique is from this month's issue of Cloth Paper Scissors.  Melanie Testa had hinted that this technique was something she helped test for a friend, and turns out that friend is her road-trip roommate from CREATE, Patricia Gaignat.  I had the pleasure of meeting her at CREATE as well.  
I am not going to give away how this was done because you should really get the magazine and give it a try, but I will say that I did this with sticky-backed fun foam and fabric paint.  The fun foam was cut into my multi part print, and then mounted onto clear template plastic to help me align the pieces.  I varied from the magazine only in using fabric paint on fabric (not paper) and the mounting on plastic.
This technique is so much easier than I had thought when Melly was showing her results way way back at IQA Chicago in April.  I could not fathom how to line us the pieces, until I realized you could do so on acetate or plastic.  
This little Octo is one of the first for me to have his legs cross over one another, something that made this project a little tougher.  
I didn't do that good of a job registering my plates, but there's next time, and I have the plates forever.  They wash up nicely.  This would be great for ATCs.

Technique of the Week #22 - Thread Painting

Project Hours: 8 hours
Design and Materials: 2 hours
Execution: 6 hours
It was soooooo good to be back in the "saddle" again.  I took this thread painting class from Elin Waterston at the Cloth Paper Scissors' art retreat called CREATE.  I had one day, so I was limited in my choices of classes to take, and when I saw this one, I thought it wasn't going to be something I was interested in, but as usual, I was wrong.  I also thought I "knew how to do that" so it wasn't going to hold my interest.  Again, wrong!
Essentially thread painting is the layering on of thread free motion style to build up a subject.  Like painting, except with thread.  So the octopus here is only made with thread.  The shading is done to give him some dimension.
The first thing Elin teaches you about thread painting is that there are no mistakes.  And that sums up how our approach was: a free and casual approach.
We were encouraged to bring designs with us, but of course, I had been thinking for two weeks of a subject with no inspiration.  When I got to class, I was going to make an octopus or a pomegranate.  I chose to stay "on theme" for this year, with this little dude.
There are things I did "wrong" that worked itself out, like some puckering that ended up "quilting out" and the shadows of his bumps on his head were done in reverse, so they look like holes.  OOPS.  Oh well, he was an experiment. 
A couple of things: this eats up thread. A LOT OF THREAD, so if you covet your expensive thread you may not want to try this.  Second, Elin teaches you to look up, get up, get away every 20 minutes or so.  This was critical, since I ended up hunched over the bed of the loaner Bernina 440 machine slaving away to cover my background.  The class hours were from 9 am to 4 pm, and we sewed for about 4 of those hours. In that time I got the octopus above done and most of the machine quilting, and he isn't finished yet, so I will post a photo of the finished work later this week! I'll be adding a section of beads and an embroidered school of fish to complete him.  Enjoy!

Technique of the Week # 20 - Notan Japanese Cut Quilt

Project hours: 2 hours
Design and materials: 1 hours
Execution: 1 hours

I learned about this awesome technique many moons ago on Jane Dunnewold's website.  She has a great tutorial here about the art of Notan, or light and dark design principles usually demostrated with papercutting.  This isn't about Scherenschnitte, German scissor cutting, though they can be similar.  The voids you leave in the paper, flipped outwards are an extension of the design in this technique.  Be sure to check out Jane's website for more info than I could possibly explain here.   
Papercutting is a great design source for quilting, and I was stumped at first to come up with a design that I wanted to actually cut from fabric.  This is one instance where my "Year of the Cephalopod" comes in handy, it's an easy design resource.  I was able to make this octopus design quickly, and I was happy with the results.  Most Notan is done in black and white for easy contrast, but to take the technique one step further I decided to use grey and pink.
Sorry it's not quilted yet, it's been a hectic week!

Technique of the Week #18 - Watercolor fusible interfacing

Project hours: 5 hours
Design and materials: 3 hours
Execution: 2 hours

Some projects are better than others, and the same goes for techniques.  I had this iron-on interfacing that you fuse your specially chosen watercolor charm squares down onto, and then you just "fold and sew" along the lines to make this easy to do watercolor effect.  The hardest part was picking out the fabrics, and I had a box of old Keepsake Quilting swatches that I used for this purpose.  The squares were one and a half inches to start, but because of how I spaced them on the interfacing I got more or less mileage, depending.
The down side was that this interfacing is so bulky at the seams when you are finished, that I really didn't want to go further and quilt it. I know this is a "needlebreaker".  It's so thick at the seams in the intersections I don't know how I will avoid them.  I ironed on my tentacles to act as my silhouetted "gate", as I knew I didn't want to do a traditional gate.  This wasn't hard to do, but having done it, I don't think I will want to revisit it.

Technique of the Week #5 - Wholecloth Painted Surface

Project Hours: About 4 hours
Design and materials: 1 hour
Execution: 3 hours

The idea for this week's quilt came from an episode of Quilting Arts, Season 4. After watching Sue Kelly show how you could paint over a quilted surface with oil paintsticks, I decided on a faster approach with a "dry brushing" technique of my own.  Paintsticks take 3-5 days to dry and cure before they can be heat set.  Ths is done with fabric paints and cured in 1 hour.
The Octopus was freedhand drawn with a chalk fabric gel pen, and then quilted over in Blue thread to match the background.  I chose dense quilting and a couple of bubbles to add interest to the background.
Once the piece was quilted, I ironed it from the back so the front would have as much heighth as it was going to get.  Using a piece of cardboard as a pallate, I daubed on some paint and got my paintbrush wet.  Here is the "dry brushing" part, where you get a lot of the paint OFF of the brush and glide it over the "hills" of the quilting, leaving the "valleys" paint free. It takes a lot of passes witht he dry brush to get the amount of paint to show up.  This was a lot of fun!

Technique of the Week #2 - Bleach Pen

Project Hours: About 5

Design and Research- about 2 hours

Execution - About 3 hours

So the LED light up squid got lots of attention from Craft blog and other various websites, and many thanks to the folks that commented and asked about the project.

This week's technique is taken from a book called Fabric Embellishing, in a chapter about discharging fabric. I could have used all of the methods in the book, but I chose to buy and try out a fabric bleach pen.  

The image is my representation of the Kraken.  A new version of "Clash of the Titans" is coming out this year, and the 1981 version is a beloved movie of mine.  My DH is playing God of War 2 on the PS3 and he also encounters a Kraken as part of the Greek mythology in the video game.  So much to my surprise when researching this lil bugger, the myth of the Kraken is NOT Greek at all.  It's Scandinavian.  And it's a gargantuan size squid or octopus, not a reptile/man thing.  This was interesting timing to learn this news, as we had just booked a Scandinavian cruise.  So the "tentacle" of fate has reached out to me once again, and I could not pass up making a version of the Kraken.

Things about this technique...  Shake the bleach pen well before using.  My first two tries the bleach was runny and bled much more than this final one.  Also, work in a well ventilated area or use a mask, it's still strong.  Follow the Anti Clor directions well.  And I thought the use of this unusual batik made for even more interesting discharged areas.  

Technique of the Week #1 - "Soft Circuitry"

Project hours: about 7
2 hours design + research
5 hours execution


I got a fabric circuitry kit for Christmas, and I had been dying to try some of the things from Craft/Make magazine about fashion technology. I thought this could be adapted to a quilt, and I was pretty ecstatic with the results.

First off, this is an interpretation of a taningia danae squid.  I say "interpretation" because not only is it a cartoon version, but the tentacles that exhibit the bioluminescence are exaggeratedly long.  Oh well!  I was researching cephalopods for my themes and came across bioluminescence and thought this was a great connection for my LED circuit project!

Here is a photo of the back of the quilt so you can see my "circuitry".  Basically, I took 2 blue LEDs and connected the positives to the back side of my coin cell battery holder, and the negatives to the front. The battery does have to be inserted correctly.  The "holder" is just a folded over piece of cloth, sewn to the back after I connected the conductive threads to the right poles.  It's nice and tight, and the battery has a good connection inside.  This holder has a benefit of being flat against a wall if I were to hang the quilt. 

A great start to my goal for a "technique a week"! I plan to provide the hours each one takes me to execute so you get a good idea of how intricate some of the methods are.