Sister Artists Butterflies & Bird

 

I got the other two butterflies and the one bird embroidered pieces inked up. This is the only piece that was on a cream colored background. I was little concerned that the blue color would end up being drastically different. I think it turned out just fine. I still need to figure out what this brown flower (maybe?) is, although it looks a bit like four yams arranged together.

The embroidered initials are signatures of the artists. I kind of like them hanging out there like they're smaller butterflies or other insects off in the distance.

My current plan is that the bird will be pieced into a tree sort of situation.  I'll continue the brown of the tree branch and blend in greens with the rest of the background.

On the bird I used some yellow in the background and instead of inking over it with blue, I added dots of green fabric pen for more texture.

Sister Artists Butterfly

 
Time for me to start working on the Sister Artists piece I need to do.  I have received these really great hand-embroidered butterflies (and one bird) made by women artists in Uganda. They're all done on white or cream fabric, and I need either a blue or green background to make the quilt work that I want to make with them. The white is just too high contrast.

I started out with some sky blue Tsukineko ink all around the butterfly, the ink wicked up through the fabric pretty quickly. I added it a small distance away from the embroidery so that it didn't change the thread color too obviously.

Then I added some "orchid odyssey" aka lavender.

That mixed together pretty well for a nice sky effect so I put in a bit darker of blue with Cerulean blue.

Here's how it looks after it's dried overnight. I like the look of it much better now, it'll be so much easier to incorporate into a quilt without the glaring white background. And even better the ink didn't affect the embroidery threads.  Now to do the other embroidered pieces in a similar manner.

Painted Silk ATC's

Here's the story on my ATC's for the CQFA meeting.

 I started out with this cream colored luscious piece of textured silk-blend snagged from FabMo.

 Using my Tsukineko ink brushes I highlighted the ridges with red.

 And then dotted the whole thing with blue. Blending the two colors with a wet brush, the inks combined with the crinkled texture acting as a mild sort of resist.

Keeping in mind that when it dries, it won't be as dark or intense, while it was still wet I added more color with Inktense watercolor blocks and then wet brushed the additional pigment to blend.

 Here's how it looks after it had time to dry and was heat-set with my iron.

 Measuring and cutting the 2.5x3.5" ATC's out of the stitched piece.

 I did some minimal quilting on each ATC, I didn't want to smash down that wonderful crinkled texture.

 Closeups of each one. I used striped washi tape which I machine embroidered either a 2 or a 5 depending on how many lines of quilting were in the ATC.

 Then I added a small piece of pink dyed wool roving, held down under some paper lace that I stitched down.

 I stitched around the edges and then zig-zagged once also.

I was really pleased with how these ATC's turned out this time and I was happy to have something to trade at the CQFA meeting. More on that tomorrow.