Yellow Bag Challenge

Yay!  For once I have finished a project ahead of time!  This bag was made in response to a challenge that a group of friends are participating in.  The challenge is to use a piece of yellow boiled wool in a bag and it has to show at least 10% of the wool and is not due until June. 

A few weeks ago I was working on a project that suddenly went wrong.  I was happily moving along on Chinaberry Dream II when I realized that there was an ugly area that could be improved by adding some screen printing to break up the solid mass of paint and fabric that was bugging me.  Unfortunately, I used an old screen that had some of the emulsion washed away and the paint was a touch too thin and ended up making the ugly area uglier.  So, I painted and marked all over it with paint sticks.  And then spent a couple of weeks looking at and wondering what in the world I could do with it.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that it would be perfect cut up and used in the yellow bag challenge. So, something good came out of what felt like a disaster at the time. Still have a little of it left, too.  There must be something else I can do with it ...

School of Fish

This school of fishes are fabric postcards that I took to the Elverhoj Museum to sell in the boutique there. The fabric backgrounds were painted with thickened dyes on cotton sateen, then screenprinted with seaweed and fish. The fish were machine quilted and embellished with rhinestone eyes and studs in various places. Tonight is the big Christmas celebration at the Elverhoj - I hope some of the revelers want to give these little guys a good home!

Progress

I am making some headway on my latest project! Here is a photo and a detail of some fabric I printed using screens created with PhotoEZ. I love the PhotoEZ method of creating screens because I can go from an idea or drawing to a finished screen in about 15 minutes. I learned about the product when I took a workshop sponsored by Wearable Art Connection taught by Ginny Eckley at Quilter's Studio. Below is the screen I used for this project, made from an original drawing inspired by the photo of the liquid amber tree that I took and posted on Nov. 15, 2007. You can see what this fabric looked like before I printed on it on my post of Dec. 5, 2007, it is in the lower photo on the right.