Finding and Making Fabric for Stinky’s Quilt

To execute my plan for Stinky’s quilt  (which you can read about in this post) I need quite a bit of fabric in six categories:
1. Dark teal
2. Medium teal
3. Light (mostly white) teal
4. Light (mostly white) orange
5. Medium orange
6. Dark orange

As you can see from this picture, I am seriously lacking in some departments.
Well, that picture was taken on December 4th and I have made some progress since then.

First, I went back through my stash and pulled more fabrics. Having the basic spectrum in place, it was easy to see that some fabrics I had originally rejected were going to work just fine!

Next, I swapped with another quilter to get some more of these:

Third, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, I gave Spoonflower.com (a place you can have your fabrics printed on demand) a whirl!

Fabrics that are mostly white with a little orange seem particularly hard to find, so I thought I would design one of those.  I love fabrics with text and was thinking of writing something to Stinky.  Then I realized that the text in the fabric could be her name and date of graduation and such and thus, the label of the quilt could be sewn into the quilt blocks…all stealth and cool like!

I got a fat quarter of this. I can’t really show it to you since Stinky’s name is all over it, but you get the jist, right?  I left that much space between the columns so that I could cut strips and the text wouldn’t be sewn into the seam allowance.  The colors look just as I had hoped they would.  I’m very happy.

All that digging around in my stash made me realize that I wanted to modify some of the fabric before including it in the quilt.  One of the dark orange prints started giving me fits because it  was reading too high contrast for the look I wanted.  Solution?  First, I carved a stripey (almost faux bois) linoleum block.

Then I cut the offending fabric into strips just a bit narrower than the stamp.  Finally,  I stamped the fabric with with fabric paint.

I love the results; they are just what I was going for.
I’ve done some printing on top of commercial fabric before but always rather neutral backgrounds.

(that’s two pieces of fabric sitting on an open page of “Lotta Prints” [affliate link]).

Using the paint to change the value of a fabric is a whole new thing for me!

I’m getting ready to do more printing over the weekend, this time with found objects.

First, however, I’ve got a dog that needs walking and some dishes that won’t wash themselves!