Play day

Today our small art quilt group STASH (Second Thursday At Somebody's House) met. We decided to have several play/learn days this year and this was our first. We made sun prints on fabric.

Ray helped me set up our big canopy in the backyard so we could work out there and have some shade to work in. As it turned out the morning was pretty overcast. The process, in a nutshell, is to use fabric paint or acrylic paint, quite wet, on fabric, to lay down a background color. Then we put the wet fabric on a sheet of newspaper on the grass, and placed objects with interesting shapes on the wet, painted fabric. As the fabric dries, the uncovered part dries faster and wicks the paint out from under the covered areas, creating silhouettes on the fabric.

We spent the morning painting and "decorating" our fabric, then broke for lunch while the fabrics dried. I put together ingredients for a big salad and the rest of the group brought goodies to add to the salad. It tasted great and we enjoyed catching up on everyone's summer activities.

After lunch we cleared the stuff off our dried fabrics and admired the prints. Not everything turned out great, of course. If we had had more sun they would have dried faster and probably made crisper prints. We learned that very flat objects make the best prints and everything dries lighter than you think it will be. We got some great results, though. Reva's prints made using a bunch of stuff from her husband's stash of metal hardware were very interesting. I was especially happy with some of my fern prints and one I made using little metal stars and a piece of plastic needlepoint canvas. We admired and analyzed, and had a great time. The challenge, now, is to use the fabric we painted today.