Elaine Quehl Workshop - Surface Design Techniques

Yesterday I was at the first of 2 workshops taken through my Guild (York Heritage Quilters Guild) given by Elaine Quehl on Surface Design Techniques. Elaine currently resides in Ottawa Ont., but was originally from a small farming community in Waterloo county. As she said at her trunk show last night at the guild meeting she was born with the quilting gene having great grandmothers, grandmothers and her mother who were all quilters.

This class was about having fun and experimenting with various products to see if you actually liked them enough to invest the money. So I'm going to go through the products from least favourite to the ones I really like and will likely invest some money to buy a supply of my own to use in future projects.

The first product just wasn't my style and I didn't even bother to make a sample and they were called Tsukineko Inks. Next came Prismacolor Artist Pencils and Caran D'ache Water Soluble Wax Pastels. I'm putting these two products together since they give you similar or related results and often you can use the products together which is what I did in my sample. They are good if you are looking for a water colour effect on fabric and then would be great enhanced with thread painting.

The next product I really liked the effects you were able to achieve using it in stencilling but it turned out I was allergic to it. They were the Shiva Paintstiks which are an oil based product, fortunately i had my allergy meds with me. I had asked Elaine if there was another product like the Shiva that wasn't based on oil but unfortunately there isn't one. I guess the good thing was that didn't end my quest. I kept thinking what else could I possibly use to give me a similar effect. As I was working with the various products if finally dawned on me and Elaine also had Setacolour acrylic fabric paints. Normally these are just paints that you use to paint on fabric. But if you use them sparingly on a stencil brush, making sure that you remove most of the paint but working it off the brush onto your palette, then you can use this product for stencilling and get the same effect. Here is my sample using the Setacolours. So this product I'm thinking I would use.

The last one is foiling, where you take a medium and apply it to the fabric to provide a bonding agent and then iron on coloured foil. Again a very striking effect which I can see using in art quilts and wall hangings.