Play Day

I remember when my sister and I were little we sometimes stayed for weekends in my Aunt's caravan. It was always an adventure. Not as scary as being under canvas but just as exciting for us townies. For some reason my strongest memory is of the sound of rain beating down on the metal roof. I'm sure it didn't rain all the time but that's how I remember it. I had flashbacks to those days today! This afternoon was really wet and dismal but it's great fun to be in my workroom in horrible weather - half the roof is glass and the hammering rain sounds just as dramatic as those caravan holidays long ago. Laura and I were having a fun time playing with deColorant discharge paste. Here's an example I made by painting the paste over a freezer paper stencil onto hand dyed cotton fabric. The pale areas show the effect of the basic paste and I used deColorant Plus to remove and replace the colours in the squares at the bottom.

Because Laura's digital printer uses fibre reactive dyes we were curious to know if the deColorant would work on her printed cotton fabrics too. The only way to find out was to try it and we were very excited to see that it does!

I think there's great potential with this - the paste has removed most of the printed colour from the fern fabric but left enough of the image visible to be interesting.

I love the effects of transparency in the branch and leaf shapes and especially in the moon. We've had so many questions about how we use discharge techniques since we added the deColorant to our online shop so these samples will be developed and included in a future DMTV video soon.

While I was waiting for the discharge paste to dry I carried on quilting my latest quilt. It should be finished in a day or two so I'll let you see it then. In the meantime I thought I'd sign off with a pretty picture! After all the months of dry weather the apple blossom is enjoying some much needed rain. With luck there will be fruit!

Thank you for reading this. I'll be back again soon - Linda