Crayons and Quilting

Last Wednesday night was our monthly quilt guild meeting. We had a demonstration on colouring on fabric. I can see that this was a dangerous demonstration for me to watch, because I can feel the start of another project coming on. This is exactly how I get distracted from my focus on finishing my UFOs!





I came home and "Googled" crayons and quilting and came up with a lot of interesting information. There are many variations of colouring quilt blocks with crayons, but the link that I found that was most like the technique demonstrated to us on Wednesday night took me to the June 2003 (No. 353) issue of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine: http://qnm.com/articles/feature44/

The article in QNM was written by Cheryl Wittmayer. If you visit Cheryl's website, you will be even further tempted by the designs that can be created using this technique: http://sew-be-it.biz/crayon_patterns.html Cheryl says that the basics to the technique are:



Trace with a .01 black pigma pen.



Color with regular Crayola crayons—not fabric crayons.



Set the colors with your iron.



Color and set as many times as you need to get the depth of color you desire.


Stitch with a backstitch by hand, or free-motion machine stitch 4 times on the drawn lines, or triple-stitch by machine on the lines.



The only differences in Cheryl's technique and the technique that was demonstrated to us at guild night were:



- Another method to trace your design from paper to fabric is to use ordinary carbon paper - simply put a piece of carbon paper between your design and your fabric and trace on the lines of your design. The design will be transferred to your fabric



- Another method to outline your design after you have finished colouring it if you don't want to do embroidery by hand or machine is to use needle punch to outline your design. Our instructor suggested doing needle punch on the reverse side of the fabric that you normally do your needle punch on--you want the stitch line on the top of your design and the "puff" of the needle punch on the back.


I can envision the possibilities of this technique. In fact, this is an excellent project for those who consider themselves to not be appliquers. Any applique design would translate well to using this technique.