Experiments & My April and May Journal Quilts are Underway!

I read on Lynda's blog about her experiments over-dying her rusted fabrics and that made me think about colouring some of the fabrics I rusted earlier this year (or was it last year?). I decided to try my Adirondack Color Wash in Denim and it worked great - I just sprayed the fabric with water first and then left the Color Wash to spread. I didn't want it to be too dark so didn't spray it too heavily. I think it makes the rust really nice. Even the lace and the rusted organza worked. Now to actually do something with them...

Building on my recent success at finishing a journal quilt, I decided to start a couple of others. April's technique is "painting on vliesofix" so I am constructing a quilt based on scraps of painted vliesofix that are left over from my first go at this quilt. I have heaps of fresh pieces I could use but I loved these colours. Anyway I had cut flower shapes out of the vliesofix so I have used the remaining shapes and ironed them random style to a recycled baby wipe (this one fortunately hasn't been anywhere bear a baby and is coloured as a result of being used as a painting tool) which has been adhered to a gorgeous piece of commercial fabric. I have then practiced my non-existent free-motion sewing skills to add petals all over the baby wipe. The next step will be to quilt the rest and maybe add some beading. The stitching is actually bright orange but it hasn't shown up that way in the scan!

May's technique is "recycling" so I am taking it literally and recycling one of the many cloth Basmatic Rice bags that we have. We make a lot of curries and eat a lot of rice so we buy rice in these 5kg bags which I re-use for all sorts of things (such as underwear and shoe travel bags) but of course we have an excess of them. I have torn one of the bags into various size rectangles and have machine stitched them onto batting using a basic grid (in red). All I intend to do now is hand-stitch around each of the frayed edges. Not sure what sort of binding but I feel it should have frayed edges!

I am currently making a whole pile of small collages for cards so that is what I am off to work on now.