Discharging the day….

First of all, I need to jump ahead to a post that I haven’t written yet…..

Last week, I took a class from Linda Cantrell and I still haven’t blogged about it, but I want to jump forward to something that she showed and tell how it relates to what I did today.

She showed us two small quilts that she has made…..

She then showed us how she uses  a Clorox Bleach Pen…..

…..to make the shadings in her vase.  Working with a shape similar to her vase, she uses the small tipped end of the pen to draw onto the fabric.   After a few minutes, the bleach discharges the color in the fabric, leaving a wonderful design (see the brown design on the left)……

Now, let’s fast forward to this afternoon.   I have been looking for another project to try more hand applique and thought that one of these types of wallhangings would be fun to work on and doable to finish.

I started out by searching my computer and the internet for photos of sunflowers, stems and leaves, coming up with these (among others)….

My plan is to make a vase that holds a single sunflower, along with several leaves.  

Next I started looking for vase pictures…..I know that I could draw one pretty easily but always feel more comfortable with having something to look at.   I found this one…

I used my copier and played with all of the patterns until I got it the size that I wanted it.

THEN, I started thinking about Linda’s technique of using the Clorox Bleach pen so, after a quick run to the store, I was ready to give it a try. 

After looking at this design, I decided to try to replicate it by cutting it out as a stencil and using the bleach to take the color out of the fabric.

First step was to cut the template out of freezer paper and carefully iron it onto the fabric.  In this photo, the fabric looks blue, but it is really a deep purple…. 

I then squeezed out a puddle of bleach and started going over my stencil with a small paintbrush.   The results were instantaneous!!!!

I quickly realized that the color would never discharge completely, so I took of the paper and washed the fabric.   Here is the result…..

You can see that I did a bit of bleach doodling around the edges as well!!!

It didn’t look like much until I put the vase outline over it…..

My original thought was to use colored markers to fill in the spaces, but finally decided to simply use a black Pigma pen to add some outlines.   I also added a little bit of color in the flower centers.  Finally, I realized that the contour lines at the top of the vase had spread and gotten too big, so I used another marker to make them slimmer and to add a bit of shadowing…..

The final step was to prepare it for appliqueing, this time using Linda Cantrell’s method of preparation….I will blog about that later….

I am REALLY excited about this result.  Now I guess that I need to go back and finish designing the wallhanging, but in any event, I had a GREAT afternoon!!!