Try Something New

Fall fell like a ton of bricks on the Northwest after a very sunny summer.  September here is generally pretty dry, but it rained a LOT last month.  The good news is that things are pretty green again.  The bad news is that my tomatoes got clobbered, as did most everyone's. The mums got pounded, but Sweet Husband staked them back up and now we have chrysanthemum trees.

After a very busy September at the "day job," I'm anxious to get back into the studio and make some quilts!  But first I took a little detour to the Portland Art & Soul Mixed Media Retreat last week.  I find it really fun and inspirational to take a class here and there outside of the quilting arena.  It changes my perspective and gives me new ideas and directions.  Art & Soul retreats are held yearly in Portland, Kansas City and Virginia Beach.  I took two classes:  No Excuses Art Journaling with Gina Rossi Armfield (www.noexcusesjournaling.com) and IPAD as Art with Lisa Thorpe.  Check out their websites; their work is pretty cool.  New skills almost always bleed over into your main passion, so try something different once in a while.  The new thing may not turn out to be a passion, but you'll take something useful with you.

Here's my little project for today:  I made the quilt "Haunting Hoofbeats" from the Dandelion Seed Design pattern.  It's very cute and goes together easily.  Haunted house, headless horseman and tomb stones, how could one go wrong?  However, if it's not in bright light, my choice of background fabric just blends in a little too well.  So now I have a couple of choices:  I can dump it and wait until I find the perfect background fabric to do it again, dump it and call it a learning exercise, or see if I can fix it with a little paint.   I seriously considered all the options and decided to try some paint.  Even if it doesn't work, it'll be worth a little time to take a shot.  The photos make the background stand out more than it does in life, but you'll get the idea.

Here are the paints I started out with.

I tried out my paint colors on a scrap of the background fabric.

It's acrylic paint so it can be thinned a bit with water.  TEST IT.  If the paint is too watery, it will bleed.  It's also worth noting that acrylic paint is permanent; once you get it where you don't want it, it's not ever coming out.  I mixed some together to get the colors I wanted.  The only drawback with mixing is that it's tough to get the exact shade twice.  On this background it won't really matter since it already has lots of shades of red, yellow and green; I'm just spicing them up a bit.

I wound up not using the lightest yellow as it was almost white and the darkest yellow I used sparingly as the paint is starting to get chunky and needs to be replaced.  (That bottle is probably 10 years old.)


Test using paint  right out of the bottle or tube, thinning it down a bit and dry brushing.  Let it dry before adding more as the color tends to blend in more as it dries.  You can always add another layer of paint or dry brush some highlights.


The changes are subtle, which is fine, but the house windows will shine out a bit more when the panes are quilted in and I've just lightened a bit around the path, tomb stones and sword hilt.

If I still feel the colors are too dark, I can go in and add some more highlights after the hanging has been quilted.

I'll post this when it's finished so you can see how it turned out.

Candy