Sue recently finished a 12 inch square quilt for an art bee challenge. The theme was "What is your passion? She decided to focus on surface design, particularly screen printing, as her passion, and called it "Passion Play". All the pieces were pulled from her stash, and only one was a commercial fabric.
We shared this on Facebook, and asked the question - which of these pieces is the commercial fabric? So far there are 2 incorrect guesses. So we thought it would be interesting to share the various pieces in the collage, and the steps they went through to arrive at the finished product.
One guess was the piece on the right with the text on it. This piece was hand-dyed and printed. It was first dyed green, but wasn't very inspiring. So last summer it got new life by being over-dyed with a teal color and color magnet. You can still see some of the original green in the photo below. The pattern was created by screen printing with a product called
Color Magnet by Jacquard; after printing, it is allowed to dry. During dyeing, more dye is attracted to the color magnet creating a tone-on-tone effect.
A strip of this was added to the collage, as it is in the picture above. Sue decided it was too dark for the other pieces in the collage, so she decided to alter it by screen printing with a discharge product called DeColourant which takes color out. The color a fabric discharges to can be a surprise, because it depends on what colors are in the dye. She did a test on a scrap of the fabric and, satisfied with the color results, went ahead with discharging the piece in the collage.
This is the thermofax screen she used for the text - a definition of the word "art", which is available in the Etsy shop
here. Using the discharge to change the color toned it down enough to work better with the other fabrics in the collage.
And there you have the process for how this piece of fabric came to be.
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