Merrily sewing and printing.

January and February - overprinting in progress.

This week has been rather busy so far. There has been block making and printing as well as the completion of the cushion cover I mentioned last time.

Firstly, the printing and blocks. The design work for these was based on the workshop I went to a couple of weeks back with NWCQ. The group have "Pattern" as their theme for 2016, and I had worked with some leaves preserved since last summer in my flower press. These were quite small - field maple, for example - and I played around with the outlines. In the end I made three blocks all based on the leaf design.

One of my print blocks - based on leaves.

The blocks are made from craft foam, and stuck using double sided tape onto foam board. These were great fun to print with and stood up to the task very well.

March on the left with February - drying.

I found it interesting to see the different effects made by the different blocks - one was purely an outline, the others were negative images of each other. The block printing was completed on calico which had already been printed using a gelliplate.

April

My last piece used the two negative blocks on the same piece of fabric. I used two slightly different colours.

Experimenting with printing medium.

What made it more interesting for me, was that I used printing medium with acrylic paints. My fabric paint collection has almost run out and I have been looking for a different method of working. Some months ago, I had tried using the medium in a workshop with Gillian Travis. I found some in Hobbycraft. I did find it rather thick, so added water to get the right consistency for block printing. I haven't used this for screen printing yet. That will have to wait until a later date.

The pieces above will be my Journal Quilts for this year. They are layered and waiting for me to free machine a leaf design over the top. My sewing machine really needs a clean before I can start work, hence my prevarication - writing this blog post instead.

Completed cushion showing piping.

I completed the woven cushion cover and it is now waiting to be added to the collection of raffle prizes for Pinfold. The lining fabric was a piece I had picked up in Ikea, and the cushion has the same fabric as the back. This is an envelope back which means that the cushion inner can just be pushed inside and there doesn't need to be any fastening. I have added piping too, just to finish it all off.

Completed cushion front.

It is quite a big cushion being 20 inches square. Cream calico, the lighter blue fabric is Fabric Freedom's "F435 William Morris Mix", whilst the main fabric is Fabric Freedom's "F433 William Morris Mix".