Painting on cloth with watercolor paint, my story.

I am a quilter.  I love the feel of cloth and the process for making art with it.  I have for as long as I can remember enjoyed painting even though I never through I was good at doing it.  As I  gained skills in quilt making I realized I was drawn to curved shapes and the color of flowers, more so

 than the geometric shapes used in traditional quilts.

 For many years I turned geometric shapes into abstracted pieced flowers like the ones you see in the image below.

For a time I moved away from using  geometric shapes and worked with large scale hand appliqued flowers created with my hand dyes.  While these large flowers were closer to what I was looking for they still fell short of my vision.  

The two images below are of this time.     

Creating works like this requires a large fabric stash and space to house it.  In October of 2009 I moved from Missouri and a house with that space to Florida where I had to rethink how I was going to continue working with cloth in a more limited space. 

Once I admitted to myself that the only way I was going to get the look I wanted in my work was to find a way of painting the images I wanted and still be able to quilt the cloth when I was done.  So I tried several techniques that would not change the hand of the cloth .  

Having used thickened dyes for surface design work while living in Missouri I knew that painting with it would not change the hand of the cloth and I tried working with it for several months trying to achieve the look I wanted.  It came close. 

Using an image I found in a pen and ink book, I decided to combine free motion thread work with fabric markers.   Close, but still, no.

In the Winter  of 2010 I began exploring the use of water color paints on cloth and ways to keep it from bleeding and ways to make the colors permanent without changing the hand of the cloth.  Here are my first two tries at using soy milk as a binder with water color paints.  Both were created using Roc-lon bleached muslin from Joann Fabrics.