Just the right colours for applique

It’s been a long time since I’ve done designs entirely in embroidery. I’ve come to prefer appliqué for many things, because the fabric adds a lot of extra qualities to the design. Apart from the technical advantages (for example, you don’t need to use large areas of embroidery, which can buckle) you can use a huge range of printed and textured fabrics which when combined with embroidery can give intriguing depths of detail to designs. And the flat matte textures of quilting fabric combines well with shiny embroidery thread.

Because of all the appliqué I do, I’ve assembled a good collection of fabrics to choose from. However even with a wide choice of colours and textures on hand I never seem to have exactly the right colours for some designs, which is very frustrating, not to say expensive, as I used to buy a lot of fabric on-line in the forlorn hope of finding something that was exactly the colour and pattern I wanted

However one day inspiration struck – there was no reason I couldn’t paint my own fabric, and get just the colours I wanted. So I ordered some bottles of fabric paint from the internet, and bought a couple of metres of plain white quilting fabric. When the paints arrived they were a great disappointment – the colours were crude and brash, like children’s poster paints and not at all the colours that I wanted.

The colours of the fabric paints were pretty crude

  
But I dredged from my memory the rules of pigment mixing and after a bit of experimentation I managed to get pretty much the colours I wanted. There was a lot to learn about painting on fabric – for example the fabric can absorb a lot of water, which blurs the brush strokes, and everything dries a lot lighter than you’ve painted it.  But I did manage to make some samples of painted fabric, and used some of it on a fish I’d just drawn

 
Appliqueed fish with customised fabric colours

And finally, just to give another side of life in the Highlands

The Grampian Highlands in late summer