Blog Hop - Mary Beth Shaw's Book: Stencil Girl

The inspiration for this piece came from Mary Beth Shaw's book, Stencil Girl (and when you buy the book, you get an exclusive stencil/bookmark with it!). Mary Beth uses paper for a wonderful paper batik 'quilt', but since I have other plans for the finished fabric I have used cotton muslin instead of paper.

Since it was a cool day and we needed a little fire to warm up the cottage, I melted my wax on top of the wood stove.









After melting the wax, I kept it at temperature using an electric melting pot while I worked on the kitchen counter.  I layed the stencils over the fabric and applied the wax with a brush. I used soya wax since it was all I had on hand, but I wasn't thrilled with the results. If I do this again I'll go back to a combination of bee's wax and paraffin. I've used this combination for batik before with good results.

Once the wax was appied I used these liquid dyes in little misters to apply the colour.








This image shows how the soya wax let some of the colour through.  Not quite what I was going for, but the end result is pleasing non the less.

The pieces were put into little ziploc bags and left over night.

 The pieces were then hung to dry outside on the line.



Unfortunately, when they were rinsed the colour became a little more pastel than I was counting on.  Oh well, they're still lovely bright colours.  These next images show the quilting that was done, inspired by the stencil patterns.

 And these images show a few of the stencils that were used. Some of the pieces didn't turn out as well, so the original stencilled image was lost.

Stencils used:

Buildings Stencil by Carol Dube 
Gears Stencil by Mary Beth Shaw
Greek Key Stencil by Mary Beth Shaw
Dots and Dashes Stencil by Jessica Sporn
Trees Stencil by Mary Beth Shaw
Pods Stencil by Jane LaFazio

My plan for this wonderful piece of quilted fabric is to make myself a carry all puppy 'diaper' bag for all the things I need to have with me for my Future Dog Guide foster puppies. I'm still designing the bag, complete with lots of pockets inside for maximum organization.  I'll post a picture of the finished bag when it's done.  Until then, thanks for visiting and joining in another fabulous StencilGirl blog hop! Please make sure you visit all of the other blogs on this wonderful week long hop!

Giveaway: 

One lucky winner, chosen at random, will receive Stencil Girl the book with exclusive stencil bookmark and (3) 6" x 5" stencils designed by Mary Beth Shaw. 

All comments left on all of the blogs will be entered into the draw.  
Giveaway will close: Sunday, September 21st @ 11:59PM Central Time

Good Luck!

Hop Stops:

StencilGirl Talk

Leslie Tucker Jenison

Linda Kittmer - you are here!

If you missed the first few days of this week long blog hop go here to find the start.

Didn't win the giveaway...buy this incredible book here

Waste Not...

After cooking beets for dinner, I just couldn't throw out the beautifully coloured 'beet water' so I poured it into a glass and tried dyeing with it.

I pushed in a skein of crochet cotton, using a bit of wooden dowel to make sure the liquid saturated the entire skein and left if over night.

Then I decided to crumple up a paper towel and press it in to soak up all of the remaining liquid before pulling them both out to dry.

While wet, the colours were fabulous!!!

They did lighten up a bit once dry, but I still think they'll be really great in some future art. Maybe next time I'll forget about eating the beets and boil some fabric and threads right in the pot to really get a dark, intense beet colour...

I'll still have to make one pot for eating though since beets are so delicious!









I also finished the May calendar spread...

Guess What I've Been Doing...

If you guessed 'playing with Procion MX dyes', you'd be right.  I'm thrilled with the wonderful range of colours I've now got to work with in my art quilts for the next while! I'm especially excited by how well the cheese cloth takes the dye, resulting in fabulously brilliant colours.  I also made a bunch of skeins of cotton threads which I also included in the dyeing process, so I'll have all of these wonderful hand-dyed threads to use to embellish my work with hand stitch.

There are so many ideas running through my imagination for what to do with these and the indigo pieces I dyed earlier in the summer...I'm off to sew!