I took some uncompleted quilt blocks from who-knows-when and reworked them with a couple layers of gelliprinted stenciling.
I made blocks out of stamped and printed fabric along with commercial fabrics. I liked it, but now don’t remember what I had in mind. From time to time, the blocks resurfaced, but I didn’t know what to do with them. They sat uncompleted with other unfinished projects all this time.
Over the past few years, I made successful quilt projects out of abandoned quilt blocks. I found that I didn’t have much attachment to them so I felt free to experiment by cutting them up, or printing, or trying out quilting ideas, often with surprising results.
I’ve been printing on fabric lately, so thought these blocks might be an interesting way to try printing on pieced fabrics. I started with black fluid acrylic paint and used a brayer to ink up a gelli printing plate. I chose a stencil with architectural elements and placed it over the inked plate. I pressed one of the blocks facedown on the print plate and stencil and rubbed it to transfer the paint to the block.
The pulled print looked pretty interesting, so I kept going until all the blocks were printed.
I continued until I printed all the blocks. I felt like it needed more color so mixed a pleasing purplish-blue with some red, blue, and white paints by squirting a few dots of each on the gelli plate and mixed it using brayer strokes. Each time I needed more of this color, I mixed it this way which added variety to the color. I chose a text stencil and printed around the edges of each block.
And really liked the result!
I also printed the same text on some dark purple batik fabric that I thought might work for the binding.
I trimmed and arranged the blocks into a pleasing arrangement a little larger than 12″ x 12″. And machine quilted it with a bright yellow thread similar to lines on the stencil.
I added some yellow paint to balance out the yellows on both sides of the composition.
Night Lights – finished 12″ x 12″ quilt
Priscilla Read - Art Journey 