Colorquilts | Fabrics

Having realized that rolling was so much more efficient than stamping, I found a technique that gives even more bang for the buck! I gave it the name "rubbing" because it puts me in mind of grave rubbings. A piece of textured something is placed on the table, and the cloth is laid over it. Then I use a roller loaded with thickened dye to roll over the place in the cloth where the texture is. All sorts of objects work well as the "textured something", and I'm always on the lookout for interesting bits of matting or grid.

On the right you see a close-up of the above fabric.

On the right you see an example of the use of a very ordinary object. I sprinkled rubber bands on my table, covered them with a piece of white fabric, and rolled over that with a roller. I had mixed up different thickened dyes, and moved from one color to another as I "inked" up my roller. After the first pass, the roller itself acquired a pattern; the rubber bands pressing into the foam made for a negative pattern of circles.

For the texture on the left-hand fabric, I used a small piece of some odd matting sort of material. It had been acquired by a friend at one of those industrial scrap recycling places. As I often do, I prepared two different thickened colors, and used them alternately on the roller.

The fabric on the left was patterned with a sample of plastic ceiling panelling -- the sort of thing one puts over fluorescent lighting fixtures.