Mary Gamester came to give us a workshop 'Transfer Painting for Quilting'. She brought along plenty of inspirational examples to show how we might use our own efforts. After explaining the process and giving some tips on how to go about getting the best results, we got to work on preparing the designs.
We spent the rest of the morning painting designs and papers, printing with Mary's wooden blocks (from
Colouricious), with the more enterprising members working on their own designs. There was not a great deal of conversation, we were all so intent on the job in hand.
We left our paintings to dry while we had some lunch. Next it was time to start cutting up some of our painted papers and rearranging them to make some interesting backgrounds.The printing stage involves ironing your paintings on to poly-cotton or a synthetic fabric. This was the really exciting bit, as the colours on the paper were very intense and we were not sure exactly what we would end up with on our fabric.
All our results will be usable, even if we are not completely satisfied with all our prints. Once you start to embellish with thread, beads and anything else that takes your fancy, the work takes on a different look. It becomes less flat and has definition. this was demonstrated clearly with Mary's sample books.
At the end of the day we had a large body of work to take a way, and some of us already had ideas on how we are going to use this technique in future projects. An inspirational day that was a lot of fun.
