Rocket Girl

Boy blacksmith wanted me to make galaxy/nebula/space shirts.  I've been trying.

I'm getting mixed results.  I'm not too sure they look much like galaxies at a distance but there is some interesting depth in the close up view. 

Spud 3 says this one is just plain gross.  That is OK,  It is ripped and I was using it to experiment with overpainting. So I started adding some machine embroidery.  This one is a design from Embroidery Library. 

Rocket girl was one of my many reminders about why I don't typically use red/pink/orange paint as the dominant color.  The red pigment just doesn't move and so the prints are indistinct.  This one was leaves that barely showed.  I over painted with black and used lots of stars.  It is a cool print, but another one that may not translate well at a distance.

I found the rocket girl design over at Urban Threads and decided it would be perfect on this shirt.  Stitched out beautifully.  But that is what you expect from Urban Threads.  More importantly, it stitched out on the t-shirt material without a hitch.  Wonderful.  Thanks UT!

Since that worked, I have also tried embroidering over some of the other shirts that haven't printed well.

 This is a kokopeli print I tried to do in red and yellow.  Again, not such a good print. 

I added an embroidered Kokopeli.  Next one will be in turquoise.  You can see a bit of the printing just below the stitching.  This is also an EmbroideryLibrary design. 

On the Work Table Today

I have been running low on sunpainted shirts.  Spud 1 sells them all at a show in November.  I haven't been taking them to shows.  I end up trying to make them in October when the leaves are tough and drying.  Not such a great plan.  Now that I have a bunch of trimming to do in the yard, I have gotten the shirts out and am working on getting 'normal' sizes for November and baby shirts to re-stock the brick and mortar shop that sells them.  If I get ahead, I'll put some in the etsy shop. 

It isn't impossible to find plain onsies in garage sales and re-sale shops but it is almost impossible to find plain white t-shirts in adult sizes to upcycle.  I might have to break down and buy some new ones.  That will be a challenge for me. 

Craft Fair

I am looking forward to the Francis Howell Central Craft Fair Saturday Oct 27. (5199 Highway N, Cottleville, MO 63304) It is from 9 - 4pm. Mostly Upcycled badges, scarves and headbands and sunpainted clothing. I will be selling the mug rugs I've been posting. New this year are some sweet upcycled bird feeders. Let me know who you are if you get a chance to stop by!

This is only fair I'm scheduled to do this season.  If you can't come to the show you can always check out my etsy shop or send me a message and let me know what you are interested in.  

And One More

I had two swap partners for the prayer flag swap.  Here is the one I made for my second partner.  She talked more about nature and one of her words was harmony.  This flag is muslin.  It was sunpainted.  Things are so hot and dry around here I had a difficult time finding leaves that were supple enough to print.  The rest is machine stitching.  

Give Away Day: Dyed. Quilted or Tied?

 

The Giveaway is officially closed.  The winner will be announced on Saturday.  Thanks for visiting.

The fine folks at Sew Mama Sew are hosting a give away day week.  It promises to be a great time to wander around the sewing blogosphere and see what everyone is doing.  I'm going to jump in on the fun with a wee offering of some sun painted fabric. 


I am offering a piece of hand dyed/painted 100% cotton muslin.  It measures 11 inches by 36 inches.  The colors are purple, turquoise and fuschia.  Some sections of the panel are vibrant.  Others are more muted. 

Sunpainted fabric uses a technique discovered in the South Seas.  Paint is applied to the fabric.  Leaves and other decorative objects are placed on to it and it is left to dry.  The sun works its magic and impressions are left behind.

 

The sun works its magic and impressions are left behind.  The colors are heat set and hold up well to washing.  I have a t-shirt I've been wearing and washing for almost 10 years now and it still looks vibrant. 

To win this fabric, you will need to answer a simple question for me.  It is something I've struggled with for a while now.  My grandmother always made a distinction between quilts and comforters.  Quilts were pieced or appliqued and hand quilted.  Quilts were made for special occasions.  Comforters were usually simple blocks sewn together.  They were tied with yarn and made for every day use.  Everyone of us has one special quilt and a stack of comforters.

Now-a-days on the internet I see a lot of tied "quilts".  They are beautifully pieced tops.  Often they have complex patterns.  Yet they are tied.  Given my background, I want to call them comforters rather than quilts. (Let me clarify. I am not drawing some sort of snobby distinction between the two.   I think that anything that is pieced is a beautiful work of art.  I have certainly made a lot of tied quilts and called them that.  The spuds actually prefer tied to quilted because they say they are softer and snuggle better.  I am simply wondering if there is a technical or general distinction between the two and if it matters.)

What I want to know is if there is a difference between the two?  Is it still a quilt if it is tied or is a comforter?  Does it matter?  Does anyone care?  Weigh in in the comments.  Entries will stay open until 3pm Central time on May 25.  I will choose a winner as soon after that as I am able.  (I will choose the winner by random.) 

Thanks for stopping by and thanks to Sew Mama Sew for setting this giveaway in motion. 

Be sure to check out all the rest of the fabulous giveaways being hosted as part of Sew Mama Sew's Giveaway Day. 

(Two quick points of clarification added.)

Sunpainting Tutorial: Painting on Fabric General Instructions

Sunlight Project Quilt 2011

For many years, I have been doing sunpainting. I started out using the Pebeo setacolor sunpaint fabric paints. First a brief history...

Sunpainting was discovered in an island setting where they left some dyed fabric out to dry. While they were gone, a palm frond fell on the fabric. When the frond was lifted off of the dry fabric, the image of it was left behind. The technique is simple. The results are beautiful and unpredictable. What follows are basic instructions for sunpainting.

Step 1

Select your fabric. One hundred percent cotton works best but you can get good results with blends and other fibers. You will probably want to test your paint and fiber combination before you commit to a big project with it. Dampen your fabric. Lay it out on a plastic or other waterproof surface. Old shower curtains and vinyl tablecloths work well as do garbage bags, vegetable bags and shopping bags. Smoother surfaces typically result in sharper prints, but wrinkles in the plastic can also add interest to the final product.

Step 2

Mix your paint. The process requires a fairly dilute paint no matter what brand you are using. The traditional translucent fabric paints are already thin so a 2 to 1 (water to paint) dilution is a good starting point. (Always read and follow the directions on the bottle for optimal results.) Craft paints and opaque fabric paints tend to be thicker. They should be diluted about 3 or 4 to 1 (water to paint). It isn't rocket science. You do not have to be precise. The only problem you will encounter is getting it too dilute. Even then you can still work with it. NOTE: It is called fabric paint because it is used to paint fabric. That means it will paint any fabric including what you are wearing. Trust me. I know. I have a special set of clothes I wear when painting. They didn't start out that way, but it is probably OK to wear your favorite comfortable horribly stained shirt while you are doing something you love to do. Right?

Step 3

Apply your paint to the fabric. Drip, splash, immerse, paint, swirl, flick, spray. It doesn't matter. The paint is going to move on the surface of the fabric. You want to cover the surface well. You will not get an image on fabric that does not have paint. You will typically get a better image from a darker color. Not all colors and brands of paint move the same. For example the pink Pebeo colors will almost certainly not move very far and they will typically leave more color under the object.

Step 3 cont.

The picture above shows the damp fabric covered with paint. You probably remember your grade school art teacher telling you to use the whole page. That applies for sunpainting as well. It is easy to miss getting paint all the way to the edges of the fabric. There are many reasons for that, some of them good, including being too close to the edge of your plastic underlayment or too close to the piece of fabric next to it. I usually start with a piece of fabric slightly larger than my final goal just to be sure I have an evenly coated surface. Yes, you can use one color. Yes, you can use more than one color. Just keep your old color mixing lessons in mind. The paint will move and mix together. You will get lovely blends. You can get unlovely muddy colors if you are not careful.

Step 4

Place objects on the surface of the fabric. Plant material is fantastic but any waterproof object will work. Make sure the objects are pressed against the fabric. Thick waxy leaves will tend to ripple and have gaps. Softer leaves and younger leaves tend to wilt onto the fabric which gives a good impression. Notice in the picture above that the grasses are not laying flush with the surface. You may use small rocks or glass decorator beads on top of the leaves to hold them down or in place if it is windy. NOTE: Be careful choosing plant material to avoid poisonous plants. Do not strip any plant or tree of all of its leaves. Please be respectful of your environment.

Step 5

Allow your fabric 'sandwich' to dry in the sun. In the picture above you can see how the flower and the leaves have wilted on to the fabric. The grasses have already been removed but you can compare the impression left by the grasses with their placement in the

Step 6

Remove your objects and prepare to be amazed.

Step 7

Heat set the fabric following the manufacturer's instructions. If you are using plant material you will want to wash your fabric after you heat set it. You want to make sure that any pollen or potential allergens are washed away before you create with your new fabric.

This should be enough information to get you started. I will write some additional posts explaining the process and the materials later.

Update. Sunpainted items are available in my shop. http://waggonswest.etsy.com

Catching Up: One Groovy Mug Rug

I finally have a bit of internet access again so I am trying to do some catching up. I made this mug rug for OneGroovyDay in the mug rug swap 2 over at Craftster. It was my second swap. I think I am getting addicted to swapping. The design in the center is stitched from an Urban Threads design. The fabric is all little scraps of sunpainted fabric. The center has more of the seed stitched quilting using pearl cotton. One of these days I am going to have to make a little quilty for myself using that stitch. It is a little wonkier than I would have liked as I didn't do my usual binding. I couldn't find anything that said USE THIS for the binding. Everything I tried seemed to draw away from the sunpaint or from the birds so I did the stitch and turn thing. I don't like that technique. I also washed it well before I sent it on. Since I wasn't home I didn't have access to an iron so it is very wrinkly. I keep telling myself that an ironing would help, but perhaps it is just a wonky wrinkly quilt. At any rate my swap partner seemed to like it.

This is the lovely mug rug and fabric bowl she made for me. I absolutely love them both. I have them on my little table where I work and I use the rug every day. I've been using the little bowl to catch the threads when I sit in my comfy chair to trim badges. I'm having a terrible time uploading pictures so you can't see the darling little bird she put on the sunrise. It is funny that we both ended up making bird quilts!

Working, Working, Working: or Watching Paint Not Dry

I hadn't planned on it but I've had the opportunity to join in two additional shows this Fall for a total of three. That has meant a lot of extra crafting time.

I've been having difficulty with my sunpainting. Instead of drying in 8 - 10 hours like usual, they are taking a day or in some cases two days to dry. There is no way to speed things up without messing with the movement of the paint and that can mess up the prints. Even with leaving them to dry completely, I am not getting good prints. It is very frustrating, particularly with the additional shows.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Iron Craft 42: Imaginary Friends

Here is a bit more about my imaginary friends from the previous post...


This is Mildred. She loves to dance with joyful abandon.


This is Irene. She is a bit more inhibited than Mildred but she is bound and determined to do her best to keep up. She finds that a nip of bathtub gin sometimes helps. Besides, she'd like very much to catch Jack's eye.


This is Jack, the sailor. He dances a jig and keeps all the ladies guessing as to where his wondering eye might land. He has a buddy Arthur who is hiding having just dumped the contents of his flask into the punch bowl. That is most likely the reason everyone is just a bit fuzzy at the dance tonight.

Frank and Evelyn are here too. They are too busy working the farm and too tired keeping track of the kids to join in the dancing so they are watching from the sidelines.


Frank is holding Frances who would love to jump down and join in.


Evelyn has baby Walter in her arms. She is so tired she fades into the wallpaper. But she does enjoy the music.


Their son Harold is hiding behind the curtain. He saw Arthur at the punchbowl and is wondering whether to try some. He has his slingshot behind his back.


Just so you can really see the whole family, here is a picture of them in the wheat field from earlier in the year.

Thanks for coming to the dance. Drive safely on your way home. Frank, I think the horses know the way so you won't have much trouble. Mildred and Irene are going to need a little help getting the Model T turned over, but I am sure Jack and Arthur will assist.

For more Imaginary Friend fun check out the entries at Just Crafty Enough.

Craftster Swap Items

I decided to join in the Friends of Craftster Raffle. It has been very exciting and intimidating to see the best projects my fellow craftsters have posted. I decided to stick with what I know and make some fabric and some badges.
Looking at the pink/purple fabric, I am thinking that I might just use that as my entry for this week's Iron Craft Challenge. The challenge is imaginary friends. I think the people in that fabric might just count as imaginary friends. I love the flapper stencils and think I need to make the rest of the dance troop.

Sunpainting: Mulberry Shirt

Earlier today I was experimenting with a new sunpaint design using mulberry leaves.

I posted this picture earlier. It is a close up of one of the leaves on the shirt. The glass beads are just there to help hold the leaf in place.

Here is a picture of the same section of the shirt after everything has dried. You can see that the paint has moved around and that there is a light impression of the leaf left behind.

Here is another leaf sitting next to where it was positioned. You can clearly see this leaf has left a much better impression than the one above. It is all part of the random nature of sunpainting.

I'm repeating this picture so you can see how the paint moves. It has already started in the lower part of the picture.

Here is a picture of the shirt once everything has dried and the leaves have been taken off. I did not put any leaves over the berries on purpose. Once the fabric was dry, I over-painted the 'mulberries' with a dry brush. I really wanted them to look more like berries than they did. That is why the purple spots have more structure than the green. I have been doing this a bit more lately as I have been trying to understand how to control the process and how to back fill when it doesn't come out exactly the way I like.

I was trying to get a few last pictures in in the poor light this evening. This one doesn't show the colors very well but it gives you an idea of what the back of the shirt looks like. I let the backs get through painted as part of the process. It is easier than trying to keep it unpainted and people seem to prefer them this way. It is a softer impression of the imagery on the front. Sometimes the impressions will transfer all the way through. They didn't on this particular shirt.

I am going to try this again. The next time, I am not going to do an allover pattern. I am going to try and 'drape' the paint over the shoulder so it looks more like a branch loaded with mulberries. I'll let you know how that works.

IC32 Summer Contest: SUNPAINT

Sunpainting has to be one of the few crafts that is mostly limited to summer. At least around here. We have a sunpainting season that begins in May and is mostly over by the end of August. It is too cool and there aren't enough leaves before May and the leaves are mostly old and too brittle after the dry weather hits in August. So we paint while the sun shines.

The picture above is a close up of a new design I am trying. If it works, it will be called mulberry. Mulberry, because the leaves I am using are from the Mulberry tree. The glass beads are just there to hold the leaf tight against the fabric. Mulberry leaves are particularly nice to work with because they wilt into the fabric and form a tight bond that leaves a clear impression. The picture above is the whole shirt laid out drying. I said this would be a new design if it works because you really can never tell what is going to happen when you sun paint. I think I will try to paint more leaf-ish shapes with the green rather than go with the splatter paint I used this time. I like how the mulberries look before the paint moves. Since it is drying as I type, I will have to post an update to show you what it looks like in the end.



To be perfectly obvious, we have developed a number of techniques that allow us to sunpaint all year round. The biggest improvement is hand cutting stencils out of thin plastic. The orange and yellow shirts are an attempt to up-size a design that works well on onsie's. Big people all say they want to have one in their size. I don't think I quite have it figured out yet, but I've got a few more ideas before I give up on it.

Kokopelli and the petroglyphs is design I make quite often. You can see the whole shirt below. I use salt and some fine lines to try and make the shirt look like a canyon wall. These are fun to do.




This little scottie dog is another favorite on kids shirts. I used him here as a back detail on the shirt below. The scottie dogs on the front are much larger than this

This is the front of the Scottie dog shirt. I painted the plaid on in mostly straight lines. The paint moves however it wants to. In this case it flowed around the stencils. I also didn't go back and 'straighten' the lines. I may dry paint over it a bit before I finish it.

This is a detail of another one of my winter designs. You can see the whole shirt below. It is laying on the stack of shirts I have made over the past couple days.


Submitted as my entry for the Iron Craft 32 Summer Contest

All of the shirts are upcycled either collected at thrift stores or donated by friends and family. These particular shirts still have to be heat set, washed and ironed.

I've added some more pictures of the mulberry shirt here.

Watching Paint Dry.

I am working as fast as I can to make some additional stock for an upcoming festival.

Fast isn't very fast when the bulk of your work time is watching paint dry. No really. When you sunpaint, you paint fast, add your stencils faster and then watch the paint dry. You never know what you are going to end up with until it is completely dry. Even if you pick everything up while it is still damp, you don't know what you have because the paint will continue to move and change until it is dry. But this is an aside to what I really want to talk about.

My market research specialist, boy blacksmith who complains that our upcycle process never has the right things in the right sizes, keeps telling me I need to make the onesie designs in big people sizes. But the tiny stencils won't make an impression on the big shirts.

I really don't feel like re-drawing everything and re-cutting it all. So I figured I could scan it in, blow it up, trace it out and cut. Of course using the scanner requires other people to find the critical connecting piece parts. That could take longer than waiting for the paint to dry.

So, I grabbed the digital camera. I've managed to master taking adequate pictures, cropping, resizing, cutting, pasting and printing all on my own. I snagged a couple shots of the most popular kid stencils, blew them up, traced them and cut them out. Now I have some, hopefully good, big people shirts with little people stencils drying and plenty of time to make some big stencils.

Iron Craft #28 Reuse: Sunpainting

This week's challenge in Iron Craft is Reuse. I don't get to play this week and probably not for the next couple weeks because the real world is about to take over my crafting time. That is particularly frustrating as one of my major craft projects involves upcycling used clothing obtained from thrift shops, garage sales and friends who are cleaning out their closets.

This is a close up of a sunprint on an upcycled t-shirt. The people are hand-cut stencils. The plant material is ordinary crab grass. In some cases, even the stencil material is upcycled from things like the backing used on printable fabric.

Here is the whole print on the t-shirt.

Sunpainting is an unpredictable process. While I repeat the use of some colors and patterns and stencils, no two items are ever identical.

This is one of my favorite prints on a thrifted receiving blanket. It is rainbow colors printed with as many different leaves as I can muster out of the garden and yard. Many of the leaves on this one are from a golden rain tree, although there are also red bud. Maple and mulberry often find their way onto the fabrics as well.

This is another one of my favorite print patterns. This is done with hand-cut stencils, Mardi Gras beads and the piece parts of an old, very ugly plastic plant. I resort to printing these in the winter when plant material is hard to come by and the price of leafy vegetables in the grocery store becomes prohibitive.

These are a lot of fun to make. A friend and I haunt the garage sales and thrift shops looking for suitable fabrics. We've printed everything from blue jeans and skirts to socks and tablecloths. Unfortunately, my kids will only wear so many of them. So I end up selling many of them at one big festival in the summer, a local shop carries a few and sometimes they show up in our etsy shop.

At any rate, if I had time this week, I would be upcycling some clothing for my iron craft challenge this week. But I can't play. Sigh...