Sun Printing - Lisa shows you some of her favourite fabric printing techniques using the sun

hi I'm Lisa Walton who died and gone to heaven and today I'm going to show you how to use transparent fabric paints we're going to do some Sun printing I'm going to use some salt to get some great effects and also do some fabric manipulation hope you enjoy it these are some of the transparent fabric paints available on the market today any of these products will give you similar results to the techniques that I'm going to show you now today I'm going to be using these Sunday paints from Kraft color because they're local paint and I like to use the local products where I can and I really like the effect so I'm just going to pour a little bit into an ice cube container which is really great just to stop you using too much paint I'm also just going to put some water on some of the fabric I'm just using a white PFD fabric prepared for dyeing fabric which is a beautiful fabric these paints will go really beautifully on cotton and silk and natural products but not on wall so you can see that where you put the water it bleeds so where there's no water you can see that it's a much sharper line I've also put two pieces of fabric down here because I don't like waste and the paint's going to bleed through which is great so I'm not going to be too careful about doing anything too beautiful today because it'll be beautiful all by itself when it's finished so I'm just mixing straight from the container you can see once I add the blue and yellow I'm getting a nice green more water you use the pelo the color now I'm just going to separate the two pieces and you can see how the paint has bled through quite nicely into the second piece I'm using a painting board that I have but you might want to put down some plastic just add a little bit more paint where it's white so one of these samples I'm going to pop some leaves and flowers the idea we're doing some prints with natural leaves and things is that if you use a soft leaf that actually sort of starts to go quite limp after it's being picked these are only picked about a few minutes ago and they're already quite limited but you can see that I'm getting a really good effect of how they're sitting very flat if I use something dry I'm not going to get a really sharp line so I tend not to use those I like some of the leaves and my garden are better than others see these ones a really limp they don't like to be picked but they make great Sun prints and you can also add some flowers and these ones are a bit dry as well you can see that they're not quite sitting as well you might like to try for a day when it's not too windy a little bit of a breeze coming up here so that's another reason why it's nice to have things sticking down a really nice placement that I found in a store somewhere I really like it I love the shapes they're great for quilting designs and you can put this on top of your wet fabric as well and this will also create a really nice Sun print so now I'm going to do some salt effects I'm still using this water because I just like a bit of paint that's left in it you and I'm now just going to separately so again I've got two pieces I want to add anything so you can use any sort of salt this is actually swing low salt which I use and you get it's quite a coarse effect you can use a much finer one if you want and the fabric needs to be quite damp so he salted starts soaking up the excess I'm also going to use Epsom salts which I found give a really great effect as well and we could just leave them now and as they dry the dirt the paint will be drawn towards the crystals and we should get a beautiful effect from that as well and with this double layer of fabric and I'm just going to do some manipulation which basically means just folding up and playing around I've deliberately used transparent paints for today because they work best with Sun printing I'll play around with some opaque paints on another day show you the great things that they can do you can see I'm not putting too much thought into it I just want to create the piece of colored fabric a couple of things that you can do with your fabric um lifting it up is I'm just going to twist this I let that sit like that and this one I'll just scrunch and what's gonna happen is as the paint dries it's going to be darker where it's showing and in the valleys it's going to go like lighter so we'll leave that one to dry now I've just moved those last two out of the way so I've got a bit more room and I just want to show you that I really don't waste anything sometimes these pieces are the best cleanup cloths but you never know when they'll come in handy so now on this cleaner area I'm just going to pop a single piece down and I'm going to do a pleat just going to use the water you love the way they just blend into each other so what I do now is I'm just actually going to pleat it and we'll just make up onto dry ice I had some paint left over and I had that scrap of fabric that I was just using as my cleanup cloth I've just popped on some of the little fun foam shapes these are they're just the little numbers you can get a great big bag very cheaply and so I've used up the rest of the paint and my scrap fabric and I'll probably get another nice little piece out of that as well it's such a hot day here that the leaves are actually getting smaller and drying up so I think this one's well and truly finished this one's just gorgeous I think don't you these ones look like they're worked really well too and you can see here how in the high points it's darker and then when we open it up we get a beautiful striped effect well these ones are working really well so here we are with the finished fabrics the sun's done its work I rinsed out the ones with salt on because they do get a little bit stiff and then I just ironed them all and the iron and the heat of the iron will heat set all the fabrics and so the fabrics can now be washed used in your projects so let's have a closer look at them so here's our leaf Sun print and just you can see that even on this really fine one here you can see some of the veins and this little pen here is a Zig fabric color pen and these are designed for use on fabric and it's a great way just to add a bit more embellishment to your flowers you can see it goes on quite smoothly and these sets of the metallic come in four colors the gold silver bronze and white and they just add a little bit more interest to your work this is the thumbprint that I did with the placemat and you can see it's got some really interesting lines and they look fabulous quilted up this is that scrap of fabric that I use the leftover paint with and just put some of the fun foam numbers on the top and you can see they've come out really nice and sharp a lot of places don't have the luxury of lots of sunshine like we do in Australia this piece here I did just in front of the window so I just painted it exactly the same as we did before in front of a window and left it to dry and you can see that it's worked just as effectively the pieces that I put the salt on and you can see that they've got a really nice texture they're looking pretty similar so the salt and the Epsom salts work fairly similarly I've got some other pieces here just to show you and this is my favorite and I can see that appearing in one of my works very soon remember that simple pleated piece this is how it comes out after the Sun has done its work magnificent you can use this sort of technique for landscapes skies just beautiful textural but lovely directional work this is that first piece that I just scrunched up randomly and it has been ironed flat but isn't it amazing how much texture that you can see even in here this is completely flat but it's created a really lovely crystalline texture and this one here is the spiral piece that I did remember I just twisted it and got a spiral so it's created a flower effect so you could do that large or small on your fabrics so there's a lot of variety that you can create just by very simple painting and the use of the Sun using transparent fabric paints thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed it see you next time bye for now you

Channel: Lisa Walton

Views: 71,623

Rating: 4.9620438 out of 5

Keywords: Quilts, Sun printing, Lisa walton, Fabrics, Surface design, Fabric paint

Id: _3TKb1XHUac

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 05 2014