Painted Canvas Collage Experiments

WelL, believe it or not the Christmas Gift Making is not yet complete!! I have two items left to craft to send to my two amazing nieces who live in Tanzania, West Africa. The girls and their parents spent their holidays going on safari in two different locations with some friends from the states. They were snorkeling in the Indian Ocean on Christmas Day and watching giraffe and wildebeast herds and even lions in the grasslands 4 days later! Hard to come up with compelling gifts when these sorts of activities are your competition!!! Actually, we have all gotten used to having packages arrive at all times of year as the mail systems are not exactly what we are used to here in the states, so this year I have pushed the limits a bit!!

I have really gotten into playing with paint on fabric and when I saw a recent article in the Nov/Dec issue of Cloth Paper Scissors about using left over scrapbooking stickers as a resist for paint, I had to get out the paints and canvas and give it a go! The idea was to use letter shaped stickers secured to your fabric and paint over the stickers . Once the paint was dry the stickers are removed and you have the fabric show thru in the letter forms. I have quite a few stickers left over from my scrapbooking days that I ahve never been able to part with but that I don't really use anymore. I am all about trying to use up what I already have!!!

I chose some bright colors of my cheapo acrylic craft paints and some cotton duck and started to play. I had decided to make some colorful wall hangings/art quilts for the girls and I was trying to tailor the color schemes and the words/numbers/resist bits to each girls particular tastes.

First I took a long piece of fabric and just added paint in various patterns. then I took smaller pieces and applied the stickers ot the fabrics after warming the fabrics slightly with a warm iron. I burnished the stickers to the fabric to ensure that they were very well stuck down. Then I painted over the stickers in various colors.

In this picture you can see that I have applied paint over the top of the black stickers. Not terribly easy to see.

Here you can see that most of the stickers have been removed . I have left the J sticker at the top half on and half off to demonstrate the difference. this technique proved very effective and it was fun to do as well!

So now what remains is to cut up all of the resist parts and combine them in a pleasing composition with whatever embellishments that I come up with. Then I will stitch it all together some by hand and some by machine, into two art quilts!

Better get cracking! Hopefully , these will be on their way to Africa before Valentines Day!!!