Design Explorations: July - Summer Dreams

Our theme for July is 'Summer Dreaming'

One of my favorite spots for ‘Summer Dreaming’ is to sit outside in my garden courtyard and watch the soft rain falling on flowers.

My friends and I explored using crayons on fabric.

The method was to heat a piece of parchment with an iron and rub the crayon on the hot paper to create a ‘puddle’ of hot wax. With a brush you pick up the hot wax and paint it onto paper (see pink-purple flowers). You then transfer that by flipping it on fabric and pressing.

 It seemed like a complicated method to create colour on fabric and I found that I got bits of crayon built up to make it uneven.

I used a piece of blue hand dye for the background.

Then, I added fusible to the back of the purple petals and pressed them in place.

For the green grass and leaves, I drew directly on the fabric with crayon and it was much less fuss and cleaner, without dark bits. I was easily able to vary the depth of colour by pressing more or less on the crayon.

That was followed by stitching of grass, flowers, dragonfly and rain.