Kansas Art Quilters Workshop

Here is Rayna Gilman (left) and Jette Clover (right), our fabulous workshop guides!

On Saturday, Jette showed her beautiful work, and some slides, and then we got busy! We painted, and printed, used toothbrushes, combs, lemon peelers, juicers, steamers (anything with textures) - really anything we wanted. We started with one pass with black on white fabric, then another pass using gelatin for printing, then another pass with a third color and another tool of our choice. At the end of the day, we were starting to get a "feel" for a light hand, as Jette would say.

The second day was all Rayna. We took the pieces we had done the day before and made rubbings using carbon based photocopies and CitrusSolve, packing tape transfers, transfers with photocopies or transparencies and gel medium and the we did some thermofax screen printing.

I must say I started with pieces that I didn't like at all. Part of the problem was I didn't take the time to mix paint, but rather, I just used black, blue and red, which eventually turned into just baby colors. Most of Sunday, I had fun learning new techniques, but I just didn't care for anything that I had done...

UNTIL......

This is the piece where it finally came together. Once I used the screen I had made before the workshop with my writing on it, I loved it!

See if you can find my grandmother's picture (Citrus Solve rub) that I enhanced with pigma pen, flowers that my grandmother loved (packing tape transfers), the screened hand writing, and the rubbed handwriting (Citrus Solve). After I got it home, I tea dyed it to make it look old.

I'm not certain if I will actually use this particular piece for a quilt or not. I've got an idea of how to incorporate it into a genealogy I am doing - maybe making a page for each person. I can see how I might use all of these techniques in other projects now, and I had a wonderful Mother's Day weekend.