This was a custom order that I recently shipped to a customer. Serenity is one of my favorite designs and I just love the color; it’s very peaceful and calming.
At the moment I’m only taking custom orders through my Etsy store which you can find here, but I’ll shortly be moving it all over to my brand new website called Linda Matthews Designs. Very exciting. Stay tuned.
Quilting on fabric treated with digital grounds is not difficult – once you know how of course – and today I’ve finally finished the project I began last week.
I began by using one of my digital art designs printed onto fabric treated with digital grounds and then machine quilted and hand embellished it. You can see my progress here and here.
I thought about making a wall hanging, but I *love* making purses and bags so there was really no hard decision to make. I really love the way it turned out.
A little bit of embellishment on the closure.
Some decorative machine stitching and machine quilting.
Want to know more?
You can find LOTS of information about digital grounds here and also on my Exploring Digital Grounds on Fabric DVD.
Or just try Digital Grounds for yourself; the sample pack is quite inexpensive and ideal for beginners, and for online purchasing I recommend DickBlick.com. Find out why.
With the Digital Grounds Online Class happening shortly (note – registration for this online class is now closed), I’ve been working up some extra class samples to show my students just how versatile and effective using digital grounds can be when printing on fabric.
One of the questions I get asked the most is whether or not you can quilt on fabric treated with digital grounds. I’ve also read a lot of complaints about people having problems sewing on it by hand or machine and I even hear statements by others saying not to use it if you’re wanting to sew or quilt on it. The reality is you can in fact sew and quilt very easily on fabric treated with digital grounds. Let’s have a look.
For this sample I chose a soft fabric to print on, not quite sheer, not quite silk, because I want to both machine quilt and hand embellish it. It’s some sort of poly-silk. I could have used a cotton fabric but I have ten yards of this stuff that I bought some years ago, the reason of course long forgotten.
I prepared the fabric with digital grounds and printed my image. You can see by the way it drapes that even after applying digital grounds and printing on it, the fabric is still very soft. This is because there are three different types of digital grounds to choose from and knowing which one to use for your particular application makes all the difference in the world.
So while I was printing I always like to do a comparison, so these next photos show you the difference between printing on treated fabric and untreated fabric.
The treated fabric has crisp clean edges, fine detail and beautiful colors.
Using the same photo printer settings, on the untreated fabric the ink has bled distorting the image and the colors.
Even adjusting the printer settings to standard print doesn’t improve the result.
So now for a little hand embellishment and machine quilting. Stay tuned for the results because you know I’ll tell it like it is 
Want to know more?
You can find LOTS of information about digital grounds here and also on my Exploring Digital Grounds on Fabric DVD.
Or just try Digital Grounds for yourself; the sample pack is quite inexpensive and ideal for beginners, and for online purchasing I recommend DickBlick.com. Find out why.
Whew … just finished the project for my upcoming “Exploring Digital Grounds on Fabric” online class; a beautiful fabric notebook cover using one of my digital art designs called “Waiting for Spring”. And aren’t we all? Waiting for spring that is.
Working with this project, students will learn the techniques I use to prepare the fabric that I print on to make my art bags, art journals and accessories. This is a technique I’ve developed using a special “fabric paper” recipe – a fusion of muslin, tissue and cheesecloth. This book cover is designed to hold a large size Moleskine notebook. If you’ve never used a Moleskine, it just feels good to use one; they are lovely notebooks.
So here it is; “Waiting for Spring” …
It has an elastic wrap to hold it closed …
Includes designs for three fabric tag bookmarks …
And designs for three standard fabric bookmarks …
And of course, lovely texture to print on …
I’ve been having some fun recently making fabric jewelry using bits and pieces of leftover embellishments and other odds and ends like “injured prints”. “Injured prints” are inkjet prints on fabric that didn’t quite turn out good enough for the project, but not bad enough to throw away.
Last week I showed you a fabric necklace that I made using some embellished yo-yos. You can see it here. And I also had a small “injured print” with a very bold and beautiful design printed on it that I wanted to use for a piece of fabric jewelry also. I decided to use it for a fabric wrist cuff. And this is how it turned out.
I love the beautiful bold design and I used digital grounds to prepare the fabric first so the colors and deep and rich and the design is very crisp. And I kind of like the shape of the wrist cuff, very bold also to complement the printed design. But I think there’s something missing. I’m not quite sure what it is; I might have to let this one sit for a while.
2012 is the year of the EPIC ADVENTURE as I lead a band of daring Creative Explorers on a year-long exploration of self-discovery and artful self-expression behind the doors of The Creative Explorer's Club. We'd love you to join us. You can find more details here.
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