A Journey in Collage on Fabric

Here we go playing with a another class sample for next March's Caribbean cruise with worldofquiltstravel.com This will be a short class so I needed to plan a small project. We do have shore excursions to take ;-) Here I'm playing with collage on fabric of thin papers (napkins tissues, tea bag tissue) plus stamping, stenciling..... and eventually quilting. It reminds me of when as kids we played with all kinds of shapes of construction paper, and glue. Only here we are using fabric, tissue, and matte medium generally used in acrylic painting. The matte medium is our GLUE. Judy Coats Perez is a master at this. She's teaching a class at Houston on this process. Kudos to her!

This effort is free and fun... but I honestly got out every stamp, stencil, paper napkin plus a bunch of other stuff to create this little sample. I used about 1/20th of what I layed out for consideration. You don't need all that.... but we sometimes can't help ourselves just like buying fabric. I started by laying out a base fabric and tearing out tissue pieces I wanted to use (tearing tissue edges seems better than a clean cut... you'll see later) I auditioned some stamps too.

When I had a decent layout .... I left the stamps on the fabric ( sort of to save their space for stamping ) and began with a foam brush first applying a thin stroking of matte medium on an area I was preparing to 'glue' tissue. The tissue was then placed on top of the wet medium... then I carefully ( I mean really carefully) applied matte medium over the top of the tissues. A light hand is needed.... or the tissue will tear. Pigment Ink stamp pads were used to get the birdie image and an initial ( so vain of me)... a "P".

Once the stamping and matted tissue dried ( took a good while...hairdryers are wonderful things to speed the process!!) I knew I wanted to use a stencil to 'tie' everything together. I chose a stencil that had a happy, pretty feel .. very quilter like... and that would be my choice.

Out came those Shiva Paintsticks I bought years ago, a stencil brush, a piece of freezer paper I used as a palette and I was ready to do some stenciling right atop what I'd created on fabric. In some cases, when an important image appeared in a stencil opening, I stenciled around but not atop the important image... (like the birdie)

This quickly unifies elements. I like it.

One could now play and tweak color for some time. Every thing you do might prompt a change/enhancement elsewhere. I wanted to do some subtle color balancing. There was a rusty yellow/orange flower in the upper left... The piece called for some subtle use of rust elsewhere, so the birdhouse on the bottom right got the call.

I'll let this dry overnight before I consider anything else. Shivas need 24 hours cure time as they have oil in them.