QC6 Day 8

This morning I spent some time sewing to complete a quilt row that I started putting together last night.  It is for the Virginia Row by Row Experience.  This is actually a national shop hop for quilters' as they travel around through the summer.  There are quilt shops in 34 states participating, and over 1250 quilt shops!  If you visit participating shops in person, you can pick up a free pattern for a row designed by that shop.  The theme is "seasons" so all the shops chose one of the 4 seasons for their design.  Many shops also offer kits for their row if you want to make yours just like theirs.  If you combine 8 rows into a finished quilt and are the first person to bring it to a participating shop, you can win 25 fat quarters of fabric.  Row by Row Experience is the national page from which you can access all the participating states and shops.

The row I am working on was designed by Artistic Artifacts.  Judy featured thermofax screens created by PGFiber2Art (that's me and Elizabeth!) and wooden printing blocks with strip piecing to create a contemporary spring row.  I followed her lead to create my own fabric featuring text screens ("art" and "stitch") on top of a gelatin plate printed background, and added a final layer of screen printed ferns.  The base fabric was hand dyed, so the whole piece was created from scratch beginning with white cotton.  (I shared the picture a few days ago but will show it again.)  This is the row that Judy designed.

Here is my hand-made fabric.

This is the row that I made using my fabric and pieces of batik for the strip piecing.  The darker strips between the rows is some of the "tree bark" fabric shown in yesterday's post.  That will also be used for the binding after the row is quilted.

I'm not planning to make a quilt with the rows I collect (at this point); so far I'm just thinking table runners.  We got the pattern from Keepsake Quilting (New Hampshire) last week, and will be visiting a few more shops tomorrow.

QC6 Day 5

Hope you enjoyed your 4th of July.  The 4th at Lake Winnipesaukee was a washout this year - literally.  It rained off and on all day - I've never seen such a quiet 4th on the lake.  Although fire works can be heard now, so I'm sure there are more to come.   The day was spent mainly in the house, not much work in the "studio" today. 

This morning was a good time for computer work.  I added 4 of our new screens to the PGFiber2Art Etsy shop - check them out!

I printed fern #2 (above) on the fabric from yesterday that has gelli printing and 1 layer of text screen printing.  I really like the way it turned out.  I also threw a few previously dyed pieces into the soda ash solution to get them ready for over-dyeing to spruce them up.

And then this afternoon I made a strawberry pie - at least we could have a patriotic desert with our hamburgers & hot dogs!

I attempted to do a little bit of sewing but didn't get very far.  That was my day.  How was yours?

Quilt Camp 6!

Can you believe it?  For the 6th year in a row, my friend Elizabeth and I are in New Hampshire for our "quilt camp"!  Actually, she would be here regardless since we are at her family's summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee! They are kind enough to invite me and let me stay as long as I want so we can play with fabric, dye, paint, all kinds of surface design and stitch.  How lucky can a girl get??  We arrived late last night, so today we are just getting started with setting up the garage "studio" and unloading the car. Also, getting settled and taking a nap or two, so today is kind of slow - no real work yet.  But stay tuned for more on our adventures in surface design over the next few weeks!

Here's the house with the garage off to the right.

Work tables set up in the partially cleared out garage.

The car is unloaded but supplies not yet organized.

Lunch break on the deck with the view of the lake.

Barbara's already been here for a week, so she's sewing up a storm!

Post SAQA Conference Printing Class

PGFiber2Art was honored to kick off a week-long series of special classes at Artistic Artifacts that followed the Studio Art Quilt Associates conference held in Alexandria last week.  Last Sunday afternoon we had a group of 10 delightful ladies for Thermofax Screen Printing, 5 who were local and 5 who attended the SAQA conference from other states - Colorado, Arizona, South Carolina, and Georgia.  They created some lovely pieces of fabric and were willing to experiment and try new things.  It was a relaxing and fun afternoon.

Above are several students hard at work. As part of their kit they chose 5 fat quarters of both hand-dyed and commercial fabric to print on.

The snowflake fabric turned out awesome!  The hand-dyed fabric is the perfect background for the all-over snowflake printing.  Below, two different circle screens are used in different colors to create layers and depth.

 I love the way these 3 prints of money plant are slightly overlapped, and also the combination of a natural design element with text.  Below a tree bark screen is combined in different colors with text.

 The piece above was created with 4 different screens and different colors to add texture and depth.

Jeanne is hard at work!

PG Fiber2Art Spring Classes

Announcing our spring 2014 classes at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria. Please consider joining us for a class. If you have taken a class from us before you may use the class as an "open studio" using our paints, screens and supplies.

Thermofax Screen Printing is on March 15 from 10-3:30.  Read more about it here.

Turn Your Photos into Thermofax Screens is April 5 from 10-1.  Read more about it here.

Fall Special - PG Fiber2Art on Etsy!

Are you ready to do some printing?  Maybe work on some fall projects or something for the upcoming holidays? Now's the time to Fall into Printing with PG Fiber2Art!  Starting today, Oct. 1, for the month of October, I am running a special in the Etsy shop.  Buy any 2 screens, and you will get a 3rd small screen FREE!  In order to use the special, you will need to select your 3 screens and add them to your cart.  Use the coupon code OCTOBER at check out, and the $4.00 cost of the free small screen will be deducted from your total.  There are 12 small screens in the shop to choose from.  The other 2 screens can be any size screen of your choice, including custom screens.  As noted in Friday's post, 5 new screens were added to the shop last week.

And here's our new shop banner - isn't it cool?  Those are screen printed hand-dyed scarves in the background.

If you are in the Washington, DC/ Northern VA/ Maryland area and want to learn more about thermofax screen printing, Elizabeth & I will be teaching our Printing with Thermofax Screens class at Artistic Artifacts on Oct. 19, from 10 AM to 3:30 PM.  Join us to get some hands-on practice with printing under the guidance of experienced teachers.   You also will have plenty of time to print your own fabric - create small pieces or print yardage, or both!  The choice is yours.  We have lots of screens for you to use, more than are available in the Etsy shop.  Additionally, in November we will be teaching Turn Your Photos into Thermofax Screens, which teaches you to use Photoshop to turn your own original photos into black and white images that can be made into screens.  Make your quilts and art truly your own by using your own images.  Hope to see you soon!  Below are some pics from our class last spring.  Oh, and don't forget to like our page on Facebook!

New Screens in PG Fiber2Art Etsy shop

Five new thermofax screens were recently added to the Etsy shop; 2 are flower sets which give you the same flower in 3 different sizes, the other 3 are graphic designs.  Here's one of the flower sets, and what it looks like printed:

 

This is called Autumn Mum, converted to a screen image from a photograph; the flowers are 3", 4" and 6".  Cool, huh?

One of the graphic designs is "ricing" elongated shapes that resemble grains of rice.  This design was hand drawn and then digitized.  Here it was used on a scarf in 3 different colors of paint and discharge product.

Head on over to the shop and check out these and the other designs.  If you haven't tried screen printing, Elizabeth & I will be teaching a thermofax printing class Oct. 19 at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria. You can read all about it and register here.

Quilt Camp 5 Underway

Here we are on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee for the 5th year of quilt camp!  (aka my friend Elizabeth's family summer house)  For anyone new to my blog, this isn't a real "camp", it's just what we call our annual summer play time to experiment with surface design, fabric dyeing and any other technique that piques our interest.  It's been a slow start with the creativity this year, we spent a lot of the first week taking care of some PG Fiber2Art business which ate up a lot of time.  But there were things that needed to be done, so that is good.  And we took a day last week to go the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA, so now in our 2nd week we're getting into the groove and I'm finally getting a blog post up.  We've done some dyeing and printing, worked on some unfinished projects and started a few new ones.  Here's some of what we've done so far.

 This is a piece I started back in March in a VCQ workshop, so what you see above was done before arriving.  It's a technique called fractured view.

This is what I've added to it - I'm calling it Winter Oaks.  In a another post I'll show how I got from the 1st to the 2nd photo  It's now ready for quilting.

I wanted to try out some new colors of dye, so these are fat quarters to see what the colors look like.  The 4 on the left are low water immersion of coral, cobalt blue, turkey red and teal; the one on the right is ice dye using coral, yellow & turkey red.

 

The 2 pictures above are both practice using thickened dye with a thermofax screen.  The colors are not as intense as I'd like but I'm glad they didn't wash out!  The one on the left is done with one of our gear screens (over a piece of fabric previously used for breakdown printing which is what you see in the background); on the right, both pieces were printed first with a screen of a sewer cover and then some graphic rectangles.

 

Molly the Mannequin is modeling a circle scarf that I dyed last year.  I knew it needed something else but wasn't sure what. After taking a block printing class right before coming up here, I thought this wooden block print would be just the thing.  This is also done with thickened dye, so the hand of the fabric stays softer than with paint.

Stay tuned for more over the next couple of weeks.

New Screens in the Etsy Shop!

I've added 4 new screens to the Etsy shop today.  If you've taken our PG Fiber2Art thermofax screen printing class at VCQ or Artistic Artifacts, you may have used some of these before, but now you can purchase your own if you are so inclined.  Head on over to the shop to check them out!  They appear at the top of the listings.  https://www.etsy.com/shop/PGFiber2Art  Here are a couple of samples.