Painting Sunflowers

The THAA sponsored a quilting workshop by Coreen Zerr which ended up being held at our house on the farm. Day one of the two day workshop focused on painting fabric to use to create sunflowers. We needed a garage to paint in as the day turned out to be cool and misty. 

First we had to stretch the 1/4 meter strips of TrendTex Cotton Lawn fabric on the stretcher frames. We worked in pairs using duck tape to attach the fabric to the wood frames. 

Painting on fabric is lots of fun. We used Seta Colour Paints in four colours - yellow, red, blue and violet. We wet the fabric with a spray bottle, then we applied a layer of yellow (the lightest colour) and then added other colours to bleed into the yellow. Adding course salt on top of the wet paint causes mottling as the paint dries. Wonderful effects. 

After letting the fabric dry, we shook off the salt, removed the fabric from the frames and heat set the colour by pressing the fabric on both sides with a hot iron. 

Coreen showed us some of her works with sunflowers on them. Each of us will use the fabric we dyed to create sunflowers. Now we are each deciding what to put with our sunflowers. Many of us are using old wagon wheels, rusty cars, birdhouses, etc. it will be fun to see what each person designs.