Hand printed fabric swap III – The write up

I’m sooooo sorry that this has taken me so long to write about.  Firstly I was waiting until all the pieces arrived from my swap partners (which they did gradually over a period of about 2 weeks) and then things went crazy with all the new collection printing and so this is the first time I’ve been able to sit down and write about the experience.

Firstly, a huge thank you to my wonderful swap partners.  I was a little intimidated by all my partners after a quick nosey on their blogs, plus the wonderful organiser Leslie was in my group, and that REALLY terrified me!  I was completely blown away by all of the fabrics though, they are just beautiful. I’m thrilled to have received them and now I’m thinking of turning them into 4 cushions for my studio, I can’t think of a nicer way to have a permanent reminder of this wonderful experience. So let me introduce you to all my partners and the wonderful fabrics they sent me…

Krista

Believe it or not, this is Krista’s first attempt at printing.  Yes, I know, I don’t believe it either but it’s true!  She sent me one large print in a gorgeous yellow as well as the smaller pieces you can see in the photo, the fabrics are a mix of block and screen printing.  I love everything about these, the prints, the colours and the base-cloths.  I can’t wait to see what Krista has planned next with her printing, I’ll definitely be watching.

Leslie – Maze and Vale

I LOVE this design, the combination of colours are beautiful and the design is so simple yet so striking.  The design was created by using stencils, you can read about on Leslie’s blog here.

Adrienne

Adrienne’s fabric piece delighted me by being in two of my favourite colours green and teal blue, here she has picked shades that go perfectly together for her stamped fabric.  I love the design, it works so well as a stamp and her layering works really well.

Kylie – Paravent Design

I had never discovered Kylie before the swap, she’s a fellow Etsy seller but you know what a huge pond Etsy is.  There are so many talented people on there, you’ll never find them all. I’m so glad to have found her work though because I instantly fell in love.  This design is block printed and I did see a sneak preview of the various designs she was working on via her blog, I hoped I would get this design as it was my favourite and so I was delighted when this arrived.

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Now, onto my contribution to the swap, Spring Daffodils.  I really wanted to create a design that had a Spring feeling to it, especially as I was sending fabric to people outside of the UK.  I love daffodils, they are my favourite flowers, but I have never used them as inspiration for a print and so now was my chance.  I worked on a design for a number of days based on real life drawings of a bunch of daffies which my husband had bought me and were sitting brightening a corner of my studio. I knew from the start that I wanted this to be a multi colour print as that’s something I don’t get much of a chance to do in my everyday printing.

Overall I was happy with the results of my print, the only thing I was disappointed about though was that I ran out of time to do a special colour-way for each of my partners.  I had decided to print 4 different colour-ways based on the favourite colours chosen my each partner but I simply ran out of time.  It would have required a lot more printing sessions and with the new collection looming on the horizon I had to abandon the plan and stick to one set of colours to be printed for everyone.

I will definitely make sure that I take part in this swap again in the future, and next time I will prepare a little further in advance.  I spend so much of my time working nowadays, but doing something like this was really uplifting and made me realise that having some time out to just play and have some fun was really worthwhile.