At today’s session of the Cranwell Contemporary Textile group some of us played around with acrylic paints, applying colour to gelli plates, glass placemats or an acetate sheet before transferring the colour to our fabrics and paper to create backgrounds for stitching onto.

 

Each quarter we are set a challenge and within that challenge we are asked to use two particular techniques.  Our latest challenge is to design and make a quilt with the title Flora and Fauna.  The two specified techniques to use are printing and stamping, hence the ‘play day’.   Although we were all using a similar technique the results were very different.

 I took along a small seam roller which I used to spread the paint onto my glass platemat.  Once printed I found that the roller had created texture and, (in my mind, if no-one else’s) two of my pieces have the look of distressed wooden planks similar to those you might see on an old house somewhere in the Mediteranean.  I am thinking of  adding moss, lichen, wild flowers, etc to create the look of an old door or boarded up window, overgrown and disused. A quick look on Google has confirmed that I can get away with adding insects as my ‘Fauna’ so one of these could be the basis of my challenge quilt sorted!