Supply List for Susan Shie

Diary Paintings for Quilts: airpen and markers

Saturday AND Monday - August 23 and 25

Supply list for participants:

• FABRIC: Painting surface: white Kona cotton, PFD (prepared for dyeing) Bring at least one yard, for a two day class. If you can’t find PDF Kona, then buy some white, medium weight, 100% cotton fabric, and wash it before bringing it. You’ll need to iron it well, to get the wrinkles out.
• Backing fabrics: Bring some backing fabrics that please you: woven cottons, in a few one yard chunks. You’ll need to decide what goes with the painting you plan to quilt in the class. The backing fabric will fold around and become the little border around the painting. Light patterns, mottled batiks, and soft color changes are good for this kind of backing use. You may want to write over the fabric, where it becomes the front border, so you don’t want dark backing fabrics.
• MARKERS: Rub-a-Dub laundry markers. Bring at least two new ones. Buy at office supply stores, sometimes in dept. store school supply sections. Google them, and don’t wait til you have to pay speed shipping! (Amazon sells them, for instance, and takes a long time to get them to you.) Several people may want to go together to buy in bulk. Rub-a-Dubs are made by Sharpie, but they’re not the same thing as regular Sharpies, which can leach an acid stain onto your work over time. Rub-a-Dubs are safe on fabrics, as they were designed as a laundry marker.
• COLOR MARKERS and SKETCHBOOK: Bring a set of children’s cheap, fine line watercolor markers, and a cheap sketchbook for taking notes and drawing your ideas out. Crayola makes a very nice 50-marker set, but you don’t NEED that many colors. You may just WANT them! The sketchbook should be at least 8.5 x 11”, regular white drawing paper.
• PAINTS: Jacquard Textile Colors transparent fabric paints. If you buy them for yourself, you can get the tiny 2+ oz bottles, or a group can buy the 8 oz bottles together. Buy yellow, goldenrod, orange, true red, emerald green, olive green, sky blue, periwinkle, violet, black, and colorless extender. Two bottles of yellow and two of extender would be good, as they go down so fast. You can buy extra colors if you like, and you can buy other brands of fabric paint. Just make sure they’re not inks, and not opaque paints. You want transparent fabric paints. . Order your paints well ahead, from Dharma Trading Co or Dick Blick. They’re often out of some of the colors you’ll want, when you order, so order early!
• BRUSHES: Flat tipped boar bristle, long handled brushes called brites, made for painting with acrylics or oils, are the best for our work with fabric. One-fourth inch to one inch wide tips. Watercolor brushes won’t work, as you need very stiff brushes to push the paint into the cloth. I will bring brushes, so you know what I mean. Don’t buy them now.
• DROPCLOTHS: Bring about three yards of clean unbleached muslin or some old light colored sheets. Or clean, ungessoed canvas, if you have some (it’s like very heavy unbleached muslin). This is used for laying under the painting as it’s made, so the wetness will go into the dropcloth, rather than sitting on plastic and keeping the painting from drying. If you have lots, you can move your wet painting to a dry dropcloth, so the painting will dry faster. Also bring some clean fabric for paint rags. Bring a plastic plate and cup for your palette and paint water holder.
• A couple of big GARBAGE BAGS: to lay flat, under your dropcloth, to protect the table from our wet painting processes.
• BATTING: You can bring cotton batting, in a standard thickness, or try the new bamboo/cotton blend, for earth consciousness. I love this stuff! Bring a crib size batt or at least enough to do a fat quarter sized quilt. The batting goes all the way out into the full border, so don’t just bring a little piece!
• MACHINE THREADS: Bring several spools of threads that you like for quilting. Just regular stuff. Variegated threads are beautiful. Plain colors are fine, too. I like light colors, myself, as they don’t conflict visually with my black tiny writing.
• SEWING MACHINE: Bring yours if it’s easy to transport. Two of you can share one sewing machine. The machine doesn’t have to do anything but straight stitch, but should be in very good working order. Bring its tools Bring a power strip and/or extension cord for your machine. I will demo how I make my self-bordered quilt sandwich and sew my “crazy grids.” In this short of a class, you don’t have to quilt your work at all, as you may need all your time for painting. In that case, don’t worry about the machine or the machine threads.
• PINS: Bring a pincushion with long quilting pins in it, for basting your border to the painting. SAFETY PINS: Bring the bent safety pins, about an inch long, for basting the body of the quilt sandwich.
• SCISSORS: Bring sharp sewing shears, as well as sharp little scissors for
• cutting threads while quilting. OPTIONAL: Bring your camera, a few pix to show us of your work, studio, home, and family, a couple of examples of your work, and a couple of music CDs you feel will be good for nice background music in class. We keep the music very soft, but it’s nice to have it.
• YOUR FEE TO ME: I will charge you a small fee for use of my brushes and airpens and the black paint that we use in them, as well as anything you didn’t bring and borrowed from me instead. This will be a very small charge usually, and I’ll have YOU decide how much you owe me, compared to others’ usage. I always want my students to feel good about their supply fees.
• I WILL BRING: 2 airpens and all of their equipment. Black fabric paint for use with the airpens. Brushes for everyone to use for painting with fabric paint. Two respirators for volunteer heat setters to use. Examples of my work.