Pink Roses

I tried something new and it worked out. You could say everything came up roses....

You see, I had this "quilt" from the long arm class I took last year. They load up some white fabric for the front so you can really see what you're doing and use whatever they have lying around for the back.


Although we tried out a lot of different things and most of the resulting "quilt" looked like messy doodling, the part where I tried a pantograph was fine. It was a relatively wide spot that had roses stitched on it. Except it was all white and pretty uninspiring.

So I thought, Wouldn't it be nice if I could paint the roses and make them pretty? But I'm not confident with actual paint, so I researched fabric markers. Some of them can be made to look a lot like paint. (Watercolours, in any case.)

I purchased some Fabrico markers so I would have them when I was ready to tackle this new thing. I'm not sure if I was ready, but at the end of March, someone in the UFO club on Ravelry more or less dared me to finish an additional project. (She was promising elephant fabric. She knows my weakness!)

Since this project was the closest of my UFOs to being finished, I gave it a go.

First some practice on the unusable part of the quilt:

Don't pre-spray the fabric with water - that is too wet.

I had the best result when I pre-wet the fabric with a small paintbrush,

and then added a little more water with the paintbrush after I had applied the marker. The colour seemed to run toward the stitches so it was hard to get it to flow toward the middle of the petal or leaf.

I then took the additional step of washing the quilt after I was done practising. This would both test the colourfastness of the markers (passed with flying colours) and remove any fabric treatments or residues that would prevent the ink from bonding properly.

And then I spent an hour or two "painting" roses and leaves. All in all, I was happy with the end result:

I had the perfect pink and white fabric for the binding. I remember buying it because I loved the tone of the pink so much. I have used bits of it for other projects, and I had almost enough left to do this binding.

For the last couple inches, I put in a piece of pink butterfly fabric. It was too dark to use around the whole quilt, but it works just fine for a couple inches.

The backing was a small print of blue flowers. I think it works just fine with the pink roses.

I used three different shades each of pink and green. The leaves were mostly the same, but I made sure to vary the roses. I could not only use different markers, I could also add more or less ink to change the intensity.

At 21"x30", the quilted ended up a little smaller than I would like for a baby quilt. I finished it right around Easter and decided it worked just fine as a table topper! :)