Sunday, May 03, 2015

The Printed Fabric Bee: Geometric Forms

Time for another reveal with The Printed Fabric Bee. This time Gerrie Congdon chose "geometric forms" as our theme. She left the color palette up to the artist. 

After scrolling through ideas and possible bits of inspiration on Pinterest, I settled on the idea of over lapping shapes. I printed this inspiration image and four shapes that I could cut out to make stencils.

Here you can see I've cut out the shapes and begun tracing them onto some yellow fabric.

You may also be able to see the registration dots that I measured out on the fabric before tracing the shapes. I wanted them to be aligned at regular intervals, so the dots provided a good guide.

This is the 12x12 inch piece that I've sent off to Gerrie. I wanted the shapes to fill up the space in a somewhat irregular pattern. Aligned, but filling different areas of the space.

Then I used watered down acrylic paint to fill in some of the spaces created by the shapes and the overlapping areas.
You can see the 12x12 piece in the foreground here and the 6x6 that will be a part of our monthly give-away on the other side of the table.

I wanted the paint to bleed over the shapes and into the other colors just like this! (I used this same idea for my Old World Maps theme.)

For one additional layer of detail, I stamped numbers in each shape. The numbers correspond to the number of sides for each shape. Does a circle have one "side?" I wasn't sure, so I left it blank.

When I joined The Printed Fabric Bee, I decided I'd make notes each month about what worked and what didn't work with my process for each theme.

Successful:
  • Printing the shape on card stock, cutting it out and tracing it using the Pigma pen was simple and effective. Lots of potential for future uses.
  • I really like the overlapping and the shapes created by the overlaps and adding paint to some of those areas... but not all.
  • I also like the watered down paint and the bleeding combined with the black lines.

Less Than Successful:
  • This color palette is pretty uninspired.
  • A less random configuration of shapes might have been more interesting. (Something more like the inspiration image which you can see printed on the paper with the stencil shapes.)
  • I might like the whole thing better without any color... just the outlines.
Leave a comment on Gerrie's blog and/or The Printed Fabric Bee blog to win a collection of "geometric forms" fabric from all the member of The Printed Fabric Bee.

4 comments:

Carol R. Eaton Designs said...

I love your process!

Treasures by Louise said...

I like it just as it is, random shapes and the color palette included. Love the grid of the registration dots, too.

The Joyful Quilter said...

Interesting process that you went through in making your fabric! I just LOVE seeing what you come up with for each project.

Gina said...

I'm so glad I came across your post. I really enjoyed your process and like how you summed up your successful and not so successful notes!