Quilt Canada (still cont'd)

My last class at Quilt Canada was called "Skylight: Painted Skies for Landscape" with Valerie Hearder. Here is her book called "Points of View" (photos of her book and the dyes are from Valerie's website).
In the morning we learned how to use transfer dyes to paint on paper and transfer the painting to fabric. The product we used is called Ranger Heat Set Inks. You can purchase these inks and read more about how to use them here on Valerie's website.
Here is a photo of my 1st paper painting on the right with the fabric transfer on the left. The yellow colour goes a long way and comes out much more intense than you would think looking at the painting. This was such great fun and I could have spent several days just playing with this technique! But there was still so much to learn!
One of the things that I loved about this class was how inspiring the classroom set up was. When you looked at Valerie as she was teaching, she was surrounded by 20 + landscape quilts and just look at these beautiful fabrics....all for us to make our landscapes!
After the painting fun, Valerie showed us a slide show and talked about landscape construction. Her approach to landscapes is more geared to intuitive decisions guided by fabric inspiration, less geared to realistic copying of a photograph or scene.
Our next step was to come on up to the fabric table, and let the fabric talk to us! Since this was only my second attempt at a landscape, ever,...all I heard the fabric saying was "ha ha, you have no idea what you are doing now!!" We were to cut fabric pieces that talked to us and use a totally intuitive process. My intuition was telling me to go back to the painting table and avoid that fabric and landscape construction table!!
But I forced myself to follow the instructions and cut a bunch of fabric bits, and put them in an order on my painted fabric. Then I needed to learn more about hand applique and here is Valerie demo-ing her technique.
Once the (stressful) decisions were made, it was relaxing hand stitching, which I enjoy. As I wrote yesterday, I have a tendency to get distracted by the energy of the other students, and other (wonderful) developing projects, but I really focused on my task and wanted to finish my (dreadful) piece while Valerie was there to guide me through any problems that might come up.
Another really neat thing that Valerie did throughout the day was to show us different techniques and products that we might want to use to enhance our landscapes. And here she is on the right demonstrating how to use the shiva paintsticks - that looked like more fun! And look at the pile of fabrics now, that were laid out in neat rows at the beginning of the class!!
Anyway, everyone who followed her instructions was able to finish their little landscape the same day and then we taped it into a frame. Valerie showed us lots of ideas for embellishing these little gems and I hope to someday come back to my landscape and add some stitching and beading.