SAQA Auction Donation

I recently sent in my quilt for the annual SAQA Donation Auction. This is SAQA's biggest fundraiser of the year.

Many small, 12" x 12" works from a wonderful list of fiber artists (including a few from this group) will be available to don your walls come September.  My donation, "Amidst the Fire" is below. You can see more pieces here.

I can't wait for the frenzy in September to begin and the joy that comes from owning a small piece of art.

--Grace

New Work

A few weeks ago I joined the SAQA Visioning project. This is a step by step, year long project that participating SAQA members will use to define one long term goal to help them move forward in their art careers.

My goal is to to define my artistic voice, to work towards narrowing down a couple of processes/techniques I want to use consistently in my work. From time to time I will report my progress.

This week I finished quilting 2 new pieces. The small red work below has been sitting waiting for some quilting. I find I enjoy the linear look of evenly spaced quilting lines and, of course, these colours always intrigue me.

The 2nd quilt is a definitely a departure from the warm colours I usually gravitate towards. For this piece I did a little experimentation with discharge paste. I cut circles in a freezer paper stencil and ironed it on to the quilt top, making sure the inner edges of the circles were completely sealed.

I find this is a much easier way to discharge fabric than using liquid or gel bleach. The paste (from Dharma Trading Co) is a gel medium consistency that I brushed over the stencil with a foam brush, waited for it to dry, gave it a good steaming then washed it out.

I will experiment with this some more to see if I get any different results that would vary the amount of discharge. Even though I prefer not to use the noxious bleach I will still do more comparisons with that tool as well.

~ Grace ~

Soy Wax Fabrics

A few weeks ago I had another go at soy wax (1st foray was in Janet's workshop). This time though I decided to play with layers.

I had some dye left over from a recent dye day and needed to use them up. After soaking the PDF in soda ash and letting it dry I stamped my first layer of soy wax with a foam leaf stamp and painted the fabric with chartreuse dye.


After 2 more layers of soy wax and dye painting I ended up with the dark green layer at right.

The last thing I wanted to do was to create a crackle effect. I did this by painting the whole piece of fabric with soy wax, letting it set up, scrunched the whole thing into a ball (see below),

then painted with Havana Brown dye and left it to dry.


I like the effect the crackle produced and will definitely try that process again.


The extra crackling you see was due to not believing the dye would reach the fabric under the thick layer of soy wax and scrunching the fabric a second time. Still, a great piece that I definitely will be using soon.

Here are 2 more fabrics from that soy wax layers session....




~ K. Grace Howes