Sun printing!

I know that this topic is coming out of the blue but it's July and my thoughts always turn to sun printing at some point in the summer. Estelle and I usually do this together and we skipped last year, mostly because we both have a nice stockpile of sun prints. But sometimes you've just got to scratch the itch and this was the week for that particular itch. We'll forget all about all of my other itches for today. 

Of course I had absolutely no plan about what I wanted to print. I wasn't all that interested in printing botanicals this time so before she came over I searched the basement for all the things I've collected for screen printing and settled on 2 things: lace and stencils. I intended to do more lace but I got a little side tracked with the stencils. But I found this one lace shower curtain panel and cut a FQ size to print.

Now you are going to see a lot of stencils in this post. I can't look each one up on the internet but I can tell you that there are 3 sources:
​Artist Cellar for water, diamonds and whimisical flowers for sure
TSC Designs for most of the single image designs like the cat, stag, birthday cake, etc. I buy them at the Mancuso Quilt Show in Hampton each year but it looks like they are getting them on their web site although you have to page through all of the big stencils before yo get to the smaller ones at the end.
Jenny Mae Designs for some of the single image designs. I also buy them at the quilt show and I can't find a web presence for them.

Another great source for stencils is Stencil Girl. I didn't use any of theirs with this but I do have some.

If you want to learn how we do sun printing you can check out my Sun Printing Tutorial.

I also wanted to test using stamps and did this one small piece. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked.

Since I was printing pieces for postcards I had to pay attention to the size of the stencil. The stencils in the bottom of the photo are 6" so they were perfect. The fist and birthday cake are smaller and had holes for hanging the stencils. I solved both issues by adding borders of duct tape in the same way we tape up screen printing screen. It worked like a  charm.

Now, let's get to the good stuff and look at the prints.
This is my shower curtain piece. I'm printing a set of 6 of these for placemats. I envision stitching around the motifs to highlight the designs. These fat quarters are big enough that I'll have plenty of leftover fabric to make binding.

This is a FQ that Estelle printed with clock parts, grids and other found objects. She's an art quilter and uses a lot of her sun prints to cut up small elements for her art quilts. 

These 3 sets turned out great and I have enough of each to do sets of postcards. I envision the water ones with a orange koi fish (see stencil above) stenciled on them. The diamond ones will probably just get a bunch of crystals and maybe no stitching at all. I'm not sure about the lace ones. I have a couple of ideas going for those.

The real problem with printing with stencils is that you can only do one at a time. So I picked 8 that I liked (because that's how many fit on my printing board). I've only printed 2 sets so far so I'll continue working on these over the next few weeks. Since there's a wait time between prints this would be a good thing to do while I'm cutting glass for mosaic fish.  I won't have to worry about the mess with either project. Any paint that I get on glass will burn off in the kiln.

The rest of these are Estelle's. Looking at these I can see that we were both fully in character in choosing our color palettes!

For you cat lovers, and I know there are a LOT of you, this stencil came from TCS Designs.

I think I'm going to do a series of the stag to use as one of my 2017 Christmas card designs.

I think she is going to use these for Christmas postcards that she sells at the Virginia Quilt Museum gift shop.

Spending a day sun printing is like having a vacation from everything.