The first painted fabric I used was to appliqué on a background, but of course you could also use painted fabric for the background to the applique. Here’s a blurry blue-green piece which I thought might work as a background for a jumping tree-frog
Tree-frog embroidered and appliqueed on a piece of painted fabric
I’ve also realised that you don’t need to use new quilting fabric to paint on - you can recycle old cottons, linens etc., and even prints and dark-coloured fabric can be given new interest with colours and patterns
It’s also occurred to me that I only need to use fabric paint if the embroidery is to be washed – if it’s for display only there is no reason I couldn’t use artists’ colours, like water colours, caseins, gouache or even oils. And recently I’ve discovered that acrylic paints (which I’ve never used before) make excellent fabric paints. They’re very easy to work with, they can give you all kinds of different effect and once dried are pretty well unremovable from fabric, so from now on I think I‘ll concentrate on the acrylics. I’m working on some of these painted designs now and will have them up here before long
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