For me, the best part about embellishing is using beautiful fabric with beautiful colors to work with and what better way to acquire beautifully colored fabric than to make it yourself by dyeing it, painting it or stamping it.
If you’re interested in fabric dyeing, there is no better resource than Paula Burch’s website, but be warned, you could possibly spend days wandering around in there as she has so much fabulous information and inspiration including many fabric dyeing tutorials.
You’ll also find some great information on the Fabric Dyeing 101 website with more free fabric dyeing tutorials including free recipes and even some business advice.
A really quick way to change the appearance of your fabric is to simply add some surface design such as simple fabric painting and/or fabric stamping.
Start out with some hand dyed or even some plain or tone-on-tone commercial fabric.
You could stamp directly onto the fabric, but I often like to begin with some free motion quilting and then stamp and paint over it.
Then add some fabric paint by painting the design. For this design I used glitter fabric.
Then using a stamp, I stamped over the painted design.
You can see how the design changes dramatically using only a simple stamp.
This will make a great background for an art quilt.
And if that’s not enough inspiration, you can find a couple of great fabric painting tutorials here on Sonji Hunt’s website and here on Alma Stoller’s blog.
I hope this inspires you to play a little today.
This post is part of the 30 Days of Titivations; a 30 day blogathon all about embellishing and embellishments.
You can find lots of free embellishment tutorials in the tutorials section of my blog which can be found here, and even more techniques can be found on my Titivations DVD. Please visit the Instructional DVD section of the store for full details.
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