I love breakdown printing!

Armed with industrial strength antihistamines, nasal spray and eye drops I am back to being a fully functioning human being. Which meant that I was able to spend last week doing the printing I had planned for Easter weekend. Oh yes!

I enjoy every part of creating my art quilts but the bit I love best is the printing. Especially if it is breakdown printing. Turning white fabric into a big pile of totally unique printed fabric is so, so satisfying.

Of course there was a lot of work involved but I printed about 20 square metres of fabric for my new ‘Print’ series. This will give me more than enough fabric to finish the pieces I have planned for my exhibition at Festival of Quilts. The weather was good at the beginning of the week so I was able to soda soak and dry more white fabric. I made up more breakdown screens, some using black thickened dye and some using print paste. For the first time this year I was able to dry some of the screens outside. Others were dried on top of a radiator. Most screens featured grids but I included a couple of screens that I made by using wooden print blocks to stamp dye onto the screen. (All this is covered in my book ‘Breakdown Your Palette’).

Once I had a stack of dried screens I pinned out fabric on my big print bench and started printing. Bliss! I varied how I printed in order to create a palette of printed fabric that included dark, medium and light fabrics. I stopped to wash, dry and iron the fabrics I had printed every couple of days so that I could check that I was getting the ‘balance’ I wanted. Yes, I even enjoy washing out my fabrics! And it is only time you will ever see a smile on my face when I’m ironing. All-in-all a great week. I can recommend it!