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Monday, February 1, 2016

My Own Fabric Line

For a long while now I've had a dream to see my designs on fabric for quilting/sewing. I recently had an eye opening jolt after seeing a designer from overseas doing something that I can actually do (but never thought of)...and she is very successful at it. That designer is Karen Lewis and she has a wonderful line of screen printed designs that she has created. You can see her site here.

So over the past few weeks I've been researching and planning and executing my plans. I've created several screens using my Thermofax machine and here are my first couple of printing tests. 


These fabrics are hand dyed by me and while I will offer screened designs on hand dyed fabrics, I also plan to use commercial solid fabrics with my designs screened on them as well.

Below is my new set up for screen printing larger fabric pieces. My husband helped me create a padded board and t-square so that I can easily set up for repeat printing. I used it for the first time this morning and am thrilled with how well it worked.


My studio space has become too small for me over the years as I've developed my likes in what I love doing. It gets a bit crowded in the room with this screen printing table set up...so I take it down and set it up when I need it.  Another goal/plan I have is to move part of my sewing space into an unused room in my house (living room). We never ever use that room, so I plan to sell some of my furniture and turn it into my sewing space and then use my current space for my printing/painting work. It's a plan that may take a few months or more to actually execute, but I look forward to it.


I am very excited to start creating more screen printed fabrics and hope to have them available soon in my Etsy shop.

Another fabric item I plan to add to my Etsy shop are my hand dyed batiks. I'm having so much fun playing with this technique. I recently learned how to use batik wax, which is different from soy wax. I much prefer the batik wax as I found the soy wax much too slimy and hard to remove the final traces of it.


Thanks for stopping by. I hope my hand printed/hand batik fabrics are appealing to you.