Technique of the Week #5 – Wholecloth Painted Surface

Project Hours: About 4 hours
Design and materials: 1 hour
Execution: 3 hours

The idea for this week’s quilt came from an episode of Quilting Arts, Season 4. After watching Sue Kelly show how you could paint over a quilted surface with oil paintsticks, I decided on a faster approach with a “dry brushing” technique of my own.  Paintsticks take 3-5 days to dry and cure before they can be heat set.  Ths is done with fabric paints and cured in 1 hour.
The Octopus was freedhand drawn with a chalk fabric gel pen, and then quilted over in Blue thread to match the background.  I chose dense quilting and a couple of bubbles to add interest to the background.
Once the piece was quilted, I ironed it from the back so the front would have as much heighth as it was going to get.  Using a piece of cardboard as a pallate, I daubed on some paint and got my paintbrush wet.  Here is the “dry brushing” part, where you get a lot of the paint OFF of the brush and glide it over the “hills” of the quilting, leaving the “valleys” paint free. It takes a lot of passes witht he dry brush to get the amount of paint to show up.  This was a lot of fun!