I'm Guest Blogging at Art Journal Every Day

I'm the guest blogger today at Art Journal Every Day! I'm blogging about using tangles in my art journal. Thank you to Julie Balzer for the opportunity! Also, if you remember my sunprinting post last year, where I used Crafters Workshop stencils to sunprint designs on painted fabric, I was very excited to learn that Julie has designed new stencils for them. Go check them out!

Paint Fabric While the Sun Shines

We had a sunny 62°F day here, so I ignored the housekeeping and yard work and pulled out the fabric paints for the first time this year.  I used some cotton pieces that I had previously painted but didn't really like plus two 12x12 plastic stencils from Crafters Workshop that I bought at Legacy Scrapbooks in Cedarburg last year. First I experimented with some Tulip fabric spray paint.  It's a pump spray rather than an aerosol so the effect can be splotchy, but it turned out pretty groovy with the "Flower Frenzy" stencil (shown above).

I had originally bought the stencils to use for sunprinting, so I tried that as well. I painted a layer of contrasting color (Pebeo Setacolor) over the previously painted fabric, and then placed the two plastic stencils, using thumbtacks to keep everything in place on this very windy afternoon. In the photo below, the Flower Frenzy and Cosmic Swirl stencils are visible at the top, and a piece I sunprinted earlier with Cosmic Swirl is at the bottom.

So here's what I made today - the top two are sunprinted, and the bottom pieces were spray-painted.

Sunprinting on Fabric

After last week's blog post about fabric painting, I managed to do a little sunprinting on Saturday. "Sun printing" is a bit of a misnomer because apparently it's not the light but the heat that causes the effect. The faster the paint dries, the brighter or darker the color sets. The paint underneath the objects (leaves, washers, doilies, etc) dries slower so the color is faded.

I took the fabric I had salt-printed (if that's a term) on Friday, which was still stretched on a frame, and painted over the whole thing in purple. Then I laid out leaves that I had pressed in a phone book and put the whole thing outside to dry.

Impatient? Who, me? The fabric was nearly dry when I lifted this leaf to see how things were going. And here's the final result:

Here's a Setacolor Soleil sun-printing tutorial at the Michaels website, though as I mentioned last week, the Michaels stores near us put all their Pebeo Setacolor fabric paints on clearance earlier this summer and don't carry it anymore. I mix my fabric paint 1:1 with distilled water.

Here's a tutorial from Simply Quilts about the salt technique. This was from an episode featuring Indiana quilt artist Phil Beaver who does some amazing applique with his hand-painted fabric.

Blogged for Fiber Arts Fridays