Ink Week, Part 4

There were just two flowers left for my last day of inking the stitchery designs from Leanne Beasley's Down in the Garden quilt. If you missed them, you can find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. At this point, I thought it would be pretty easy. But, you should never count your chickens before they're hatched!

The large coral flowers, in the photo above, did go well. It was the last flower, the light pink one, that gave me a lot of trouble. Here's my well-used test sheet again:

The two remaining flowers were similar in shape, one large and one small, so I decided to make them two shades of pink, so they would be related but still different. Both would start from the Tsukineko Rose Pink ink.

1. Here I started with a drop of the pure Rose Pink, and then gradually diluted it.
2. Using the brush, I tried a petal shape with the diluted pink and the gold from the sunflowers. I liked it, but for the large flowers I wanted something more orange.
3. This combination looked good to me.
4. I made two petals with a long triangle of orange at the base, and the pink around the edge. It looked good to me so I went ahead and inked two test flowers, in the photo below, the four watering can blocks, and the large centre block.

   

   Large flowers seen from the back on the left, and front on the right

5. For the smaller flowers I planned to make them both lighter and a little cooler. This is a drop of the pure Tsukineko Orchid Odyssey ink. I added just two drops of the orchid to cool off the diluted Rose Pink I'd been using, and a lot more water.
6. I also started over with some fresh Lemon Yellow from the bottle, and diluted it heavily. Then I tried to reproduce the effect I had lucked into at #2.
7. I started with some water in the centre of the petal, and then put a line of the light yellow down the middle, surrounded by a line of the light pink. The first two tries blurred together to make a muddy orange in the centre.
8. Success!
9. Time to try a test flower. Argh! The real flower petals were smaller than #8, and there just wasn't room for the water, yellow and pink to blend nicely.
10. I tried this one without water, just the yellow and pink ink. The muddy orange came back, and it was still too dark over all.
11. I had to draw on a couple more quick test flowers. This one was still not consistent, but I liked the lighter look.
12. Still not great.

I had run out of room on my test sheet and I didn't have any more test flowers, so I decided to just go ahead on the real blocks. Probably not advisable! I tried two with water, and small dabs of yellow and pink. Then I abandoned the water for good, and just made dots of yellow and pink with dry white fabric in between. Fortunately, the first two pieces were so light that I was able to go back after they dried and add darker pink dots to them as well. If you look closely at the first photo, you can see that's what I did.

I used the final version of the small flowers on the centre block:

Although they were not what I intended, I think the small flowers still work anyway. Plus, now I have the opportunity to go in with the stitching and balance things a little more.

Next time I'll have some of that stitching to show, and my final thoughts on the process. It's been quite a journey! Please click here to read on.

Ink Week, Part 3

Ink Week is becoming Ink Fortnight, but never mind, I'm still forging ahead! If you missed the previous posts, please click here for Part 1, or click here for Part 2.

Today was by far the most ambitious day planned, and God definitely smiled on me, because it went exactly as I had hoped. As each layer goes on, the consequences of a mistake get larger, so I am very grateful to come through the tricky part intact!

I'm making Leanne Beasley's stitchery quilt, Down in the Garden. This round flower is used all over the quilt. I thought that if I left out the inner circle and the dot, it would look like a little sunflower. I always love sunflowers!

My first thought was to fill the centre of the "sunflower" with a couched lattice, as I did in one of the Best Friends Forever motifs. But, I want to get away from the intensive embroidery I've done on that project, so my second thought was this fancy shaded ink that you see here.

Those shaded gold centres are one of the key features of the whole quilt, so they had to work. I reused my Day 2 test sheet, with just a few extra petals drawn on for the other flowers. By reusing the same sheet, it is easy to see if all the colours are working well together.

1. I started by mixing a dark, sludgy brown from my three secondary colours, Tsukineko's Emerald, orange (which is actually called "Tangerine"), and the dark purple Wisteria. Strictly speaking, it is better to mix from the three primary colours, but I didn't buy red, just some Rose Pink. My sludge was not the nicest brown.
2. Fortunately, I have been saving all my mixes from previous days, which I highly recommend. I took some of my yellow orange petal mix from Day 2, added more orange, then drop by drop added some of the sludge from #1 until it turned this caramel brown. It was still a little greenish, though, until
3. I added a couple drops of the Rose Pink. Success!
4. For the gold part of the centres I again went back to the yellow orange petal mix from Day 2, added some water, a drop of the #1 sludge, and a drop of the pure Lemon Yellow from the bottle, and lucked into the right colour pretty quickly.
5. I loaded the gold and the caramel onto separate Fantastix. For the centres I began with a circle of the gold in the middle, leaving a wide white border inside the line. Then I used the caramel to circle around the gold, still well inside the line, and blended it over the gold towards the centre. I tested the circles with a centred highlight, and an off-centre highlight. I decided I liked the off-centre one best.
6. Even though I was satisfied at that point, I thought I would try a circle with some extra water in the middle before I put in the ink, to see if it blended better. It did not! The gold washed out, and the caramel was too dark by contrast. I went ahead and used the #5 formula to ink the centre block, the four watering cans, and the 16 individual flowers shown below.
7. After a rest and a quick lunch I sat down with the purple, Wisteria. The first drop is the pure undiluted ink, and below that is the diluted ink. 
8. In my mind I was thinking of something like DMC 327 for these flowers, so I added some of the caramel mix from #3 to the diluted purple. This was close, but a little too brown, so I added a few drops more of the Wisteria, and a little more water, until
9. It looked good to me!

There are twelve of these individual yellow flowers in the overall quilt design. I made a few extra so I could pick the best ones. I still had a few white squares of fabric left over, and over the weekend it occurred to me to use them to test the other flowers as well:

Maybe they will end up in the quilt, maybe not. The purple daisy petals were quite narrow...

...so I was glad to have the extra practice before I inked the larger blocks!

With tight spaces like this, I found it was best to start in the middle of the widest petal, and work out to the points as the Fantastix dried out.

As I suspected, it was too optimistic to think I could finish all the flowers in one day. But, it's definitely coming along!

I would also like to do some two-colour shading on the remaining two types of flowers. That'll be Day 4! Please click here to read on.

Ink Week, Part 2

In Part 1 of Ink Week, I inadvertently created a splotchy pattern with the Cerulean Blue Tsukineko ink in the border of two of my birdhouse blocks for Leanne Beasley's Down in the Garden stitchery quilt. In the end, I liked those ones the best, so I thought I would do the same technique to fill in the watering cans in four of the other blocks.

However, I learned that the Cool Gray ink behaves rather differently! The blue ink really moves out the edges of the brushstroke, while the grey seems to even itself out. In the photo above, the splotches have almost vanished.

I also learned that the ink tends to settle to the bottom of the cup over time. This was actually helpful, because you end up with more pigment at the tip of the brush, which then pushes out the edge of the brushstroke. So the last piece I did came out splotchier, as you can see in the photo I took while it was still wet:

But, once it dried, the edges of the strokes still blended out:

Which is fine! It still has that watercolour feel to it. You will also notice that for these blocks I decided that it would be better to have a thin white edge along the line, than to let the ink go over. It will be interesting to see how it looks once the lines are stitched!

Until this point all the inks were used straight out of the bottle. The colours for the leaves and flowers, though, are all mixed from two or more inks.

Here's my Day 2 test sheet:

After finishing all the grey parts, I started to mix the colours:

1. I began with drops of the pure, undiluted ink. This is the orange,
2. And this is the pure yellow,
3. And this is the Banana Cream that I used for the birdhouses.
4. The pure yellow is very harsh and a little greenish, and my goal was a softer, yellow orange. I started by mixing the pure yellow with a couple drops of pure orange. Nice colour!
5. But, when diluted, the orange almost vanished and it went back to bright yellow. You can see I tried various levels of orange and water to fine tune the mix.
6. I thought I had the colour right here, but it still turned out to be too saturated, and not as transparent as I wanted.
7. This is the final mix that I used on all the blocks. In the photo below you can see that the ink looked a lot oranger in the mixing cup than it did on the fabric.
8. Next up were the greens. Now that I knew how much the colour changed with the addition of water, I looked at that first. This one is the pure lime green ink on the right, and the diluted lime green on the left. You can also see that the lime ink in the bottle is really a mix of pigments, and that the blue pigments once again moved closer to the edges of the drops, leaving the yellow in the centre.
9. The emerald green ink was really surprising! On the left is the pure ink, and on the right is the diluted ink, which turned almost turquoise!
10. In the end I used three different greens for the quilt. This one is a diluted combination of the lime and emerald. It still felt a little artificial to me,
11. So I added a couple drops of the orange to brown it down. This is the mix I used for all the leaves.

There are also diluted lime, and a lemon-lime mix in some of the flower centres. Here's that yellow orange from #7:

I still have the centres of the yellow flowers, and the three other flowers to do, which will amount to four separate sessions with a dry in between each one. I'd like to do it in one day, but it may end up being two more. I'm past the "white knuckle" stage though, and it's starting to be fun! You can already see the blocks coming to life:

On to Day 3!

Ink Week, Part 1

I have not been able to find any online information about how to use Tsukineko inks in a painterly way, so I thought I'd go in depth on my learning experiences with them this week. You can learn from my mistakes as well as my successes!

I'm making Leanne Beasley's stitchery quilt, Down the the Garden. A year ago I chose Tamara Kate's Flight Patterns fabric collection for this project. Inspired by the watercolour effects in the fabric, I thought it would be nice to "watercolour" the stitchery designs before I stitch them. Rather than use real watercolour paint, I chose Tsukineko inks for the job, which are water-based, but can be heat set to become permanent and washable.

I've had the ink for 10 months now, but it was never the "right time" to get started. Finally, to get over the first hurdle, I dredged up my science lab experience from a long time ago, and set it up like an experiment. I wrote down the things I wanted to learn:

• Test ink colours - Banana Cream, Cool Gray, Cerulean Blue (not the colours in the photo above, those are for later)
• Compare brushes with Tsukineko Fantastix
• Try various wet/dry wash techniques
• Test drying, heat setting

Then I made a test sheet with the same fabric, Kona PFD, and permanent lines, Pigma Micron, that I will use for the quilt:

I ironed a piece of freezer paper to the back of the fabric, to stabilize it while I worked. I picked up this tip from Linda M. Poole's book, Painted Applique, and it worked great!

Then I assembled all my equipment. Tsukineko Fantastix are blank foam pens that you can load with your ink:

I also bought a cheap set of brushes, and single-use eyedroppers to transfer the ink from the bottle to the mixing cups. I'm calling this "Ink Week," by the way, because my sewing machine is packed away until I finish this phase of the project.

Here's how my experiment progressed:

1. I started with the undiluted blue ink, and a small brush. The Kona PFD fabric really sucks up the ink, and the more you hesitate, the wider the line.
2. I wetted the corner of the fabric with water, and used the brush to paint a line of pure ink, then pull it back into the water. The wash took time to really soak back through the fabric.
3. I decided the pure pigment was too dark for the effect I wanted to achieve, so I diluted the ink, and tried to repeat #2 along the edge of the first square. The diluted ink really soaks in fast! 
4. I still felt the ink was too dark, so I diluted it more and loaded it onto one of the Tsukineko Fantastix. They are much easier to control!  I found that if I drew about 1/8" away from the line, the ink soaked up to the line but not usually past it. It is easiest to just dip the Fantastix in your ink, and hold the tip up for a few seconds to let it soak in.
5. I used the same technique as #4 to colour around the birdhouse. The colour was flatter than I would have preferred, but I was ready to move on!
6. Same as the blue, I started with the Cool Gray diluted and loaded onto a Fantastix for the flat area of colour in the first circle.
7. For the second circle I soaked a little water into the centre first, and then filled in the edges with the same Fantastix as #6, and blended it back into the centre. Success! 
8. I tried the same blended technique in the roof, with moderate success. At this point I got out the blow dryer and dried all the blue and grey bits before I started with the yellow. Waiting for the paint to dry is worst part of a watercolour technique!
9. The yellow square was done the same way as #7, with a little water in the centre, diluted ink and a fresh Fantastix. There was no problem at all with the wet yellow ink picking up any of the dry blue ink.
10. I went ahead and finished the birdhouse with the yellow.

Feeling pretty confident, and with the inks all set up, I decided to forge ahead and colour the four birdhouse blocks for the real quilt.

I started with the yellow this time, dried it, and painted the grey. The real grey roofs were narrower than my test one, so I gave up on the wash after two of them, and just filled them in with solid grey. The block above has been heat set with the iron, and I found that the yellow and grey both faded away more than I wanted.

The blue, however, was a little too dark! I wasn't totally happy with the flat blue colour around the birdhouse in the test piece, so I loaded the edges of the fabric with plain water, and tried to use the Fantastix to blend the ink back. However, I ran out of the first batch of diluted ink, and you can see I made the second batch too dark.

For the third and fourth houses, I was getting impatient, and I decided to use a wider brush to ink around the edges of the fabric:

You can really see how the ink carries out to the edges of the brushstroke! Then I used a Fantastix with the same mix to fill in the gaps along the line. I like these ones the best -- the blotches look a little like clouds to me.

All of them have some bleeding of the blue over the line. My hope is that with the stitchery added, it will not be too noticeable. I made a start with the embroidery on the worst one first, just to see if I can live with it:

 

It certainly has the "loose" feeling of some watercolours! I bought enough fabric to redo everything if the experiment failed, but at this point I want to keep moving forward. The others will be better, and once it is part of the whole quilt, I think it will just be a minor quibble.

Next up, the watering cans, and all the larger flowers around the quilt. I think it will be a couple more days!

Click here for Part 2!

DitG Fabrics and Plans

Over the past two weeks I've done quite a bit of prep work for my version of Leanne Beasley's Down in the Garden. It's finally all coming clear in my mind! Choosing the fabrics has been the final catalyst for me.

Flight Patterns' Bargello

When I started my other stitchery quilt, Best Friends Forever, I started by choosing thread colours that I liked. Since then, I've had a heck of a time finding fabrics in the same colour scheme. In the end, I will have to use almost entirely monochromatic blenders for that quilt. Which is fine, but I really prefer prints. Down in the Garden will be based on Tamara Kate's Flight Patterns collection. I've already fussy cut the Bargello print in the photo above for the Dresden blocks:

I will also use the Bargello fabric for the border. The thing I like the most about this collection is the light, watercoloured brushstrokes that were used by the designer. I want to keep that feeling with the rest of my fabrics. I pulled out some of my Riley Blake ginghams:

And I added some dots and simple prints:

Almost all the fabrics have some white areas, which keeps everything light and about the same saturation level. Since my last post on this project, I've been stressing about the herb pots that I've already stitched. Is the fabric I used for the pots too dark or too grey? Here they are in the mix:

I was worried that the herb pot patches would be dark holes against all the other light fabrics, but they are not too bad in this photo.

Now, though, there is another wrinkle, because I have changed the font in all the other blocks. I mentioned last time that I planned to change the words on the quilt to a couple of quotes that resonated better with me. I used Microsoft Word to do the layout for me, and just taped it over the original words where they occurred. Here's my revised layout for Block 5:

The font is Gabriola, 65 pt. I added a plus sign for the line breaks, which I plan to stitch as a little flower. I've found that a light box is not necessary with light fabrics. I just shine a bright light down from the top. Here it is all traced out:

That's 2.5 hours work! The block is 15" square. As I did with my redwork, I traced everything with pencil first, and then went over the lines with a 005 Pigma Micron permanent pen. I hate it when the lines rub off while you are stitching. And this time, I'm also planning to add some watercolour effects with Tsukineko inks before I stitch, so the lines have to be permanent.

Almost all the stitching will be stem stitch, because I don't want to spend as much time stitching as I have with Best Friends Forever. Plus, I've realized that the inking is still going to take several days.

Some of the smaller flowers, though, will be done with lazy daisies and granitos. For those flowers, I only marked dots where the needle will go through the fabric, rather than a whole loop that may not be covered by the stitch. You can see how that works on one of the birdhouse blocks:

All the tracing is now done. I'm still a long way from stitching any of these big blocks, but I have started on the smaller ones. I'm going to wait and see if I will need to re-stitch the herb pots, either onto lighter fabrics, or with the new font. I'm really happy with my stitching on those, so I'd hate to have to do them again. Stay tuned!

Sashiko Inspiration

Best Friends Forever Month 5.4

Back in July I was just starting Month 5 of Best Friends Forever, and looking for a new way to fill in the large circle in the centre of this motif, when my blogging friend Jillian took a class on Kantha embroidery. The criss crossing running stitch of that technique reminded me of some Japanese sashiko stitch designs:

I reviewed this book back in 2012. I decided to try out one of my favourite sashiko patterns for this motif. The grid was marked with a water erasable marker:

I stitched around the circle with stem stitch first.  This gave me an anchor for the lines of sashiko:

The stitches look loose here because I tried to blot out the blue ink before I took the photo. Not very well! But they are fine after a proper rinse. The back is cute too:

You can see how I was able to weave the ends into the stem stitch border.

This was the first part of Month 5 to be stitched, and then the motif languished while I stitched all the others. I really was low on ideas on how to colour and stitch the rest of it. In the end it is a little different - the first motif that doesn't have any yellow - and I am satisfied with it.

Plus, after my six week holiday from this project, I am refreshed and full of new ideas for Month 6! Three months left. :)

Semi-new project - Down in the Garden

Darn, darn, double darn. I'm rolling along, sewing my circles for last week's new project, Jacks and Cats, when I catch a glimpse of a familiar project in the Sweet P sidebar, which takes me to Kaaren's blog, The Painted Quilt. The familiar project is Down in the Garden by Leanne Beasley, which I bought at the same time as Best Friends Forever (and Scandinavian Rose too, which is still in my stash), and which I have been working on now and then for the past nine months.

I showed it to you here, without properly introducing the project. There's been a lot of waffling since then! I said as much to Kaaren in the comments, and she encouraged me to just start anyway. I sent her a considered reply, explaining that I had just started a new quilt, and that although it was tempting, I could not possibly pick up this one too.

But here I am! With another new project to officially add to the books.

This summer I did most of the herb pots (two are left) that are scattered around the quilt, in addition to the Dresdens that I previewed back in March. I have used the same floss for all the herbs, DMC 4047 from their Color Variations line. I tried to differentiate the herbs by using different stitches -- fly stitch for the rosemary, stem stitch for the chives, round detached chain stitches for the basil, and backstitch on the sage.

I've been thinking about it constantly since I saw Kaaren's blog post.  She has started with Block Five, which has been the source of all my angst.

The designer has written a number of thoughts that are meaningful to her and framed them in the centre block. I'd like to keep this wall quilt in my studio space, so I thought the words should be meaningful to me. The core fabrics for my quilt will be Tamara Kate's Flight Patterns collection...

...which include a lot of butterflies. Four of the other blocks also have butterflies. I really want to include bees as well, because I think they will be a good industrious symbol for the studio. After many searches on keywords like "butterfly," "bee," and "garden," I've finally settled on two quotes. Andrew Marvell for the Block Five centre:

And, as it works,

the industrious bee

Computes its time

as well as we.

How could such sweet

and wholesome hours

Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!

...and this great contrasting quote by Tagore for the surrounding blocks:

The butterfly counts

not months

but moments,

and has time enough.

Sometimes decision paralysis is the biggest obstacle for me. Now that's decided, maybe things will start to move along!

And hey, since it's still Wednesday, I'll link up with WIP Wednesday at The Needle and Thread Network as well.

Wordless WIP Wednesday -- BFF 5.3

WIP Wednesday Link Up

Wordless WIP Wednesday - BFF 5.2

Accidental Daffodils!

WIP Wednesday Link Up

Another Blanket Stitch Variation

Isn't blanket stitch a great stitch? This time I used it as bunting:

It took a bit of trial and error, but I got there in the end! Surprisingly, it seemed to work best with four stitches up to the point, a catch stitch at the tip, and just two stitches back down.

As you can see, colourful bunting was a must on this motif:

This is one of my favourites so far. Bunting is always fun, and I love the lines of the elephant, too. Plus, I think the cardinals are becoming the spirit animals of the project, the way they keep showing up.

I'll leave you with a final detail, before it's on to the next! Don't forget to check out all the other links at WIP Wednesday, too.