Bleeding Lovely Play Day

A couple of weeks ago I got together with Carrie (and her cats - thanks for the cuddles girls) for a play day.  Carrie had tweeted about her experiments with Derwent Inktense Pencils on fabric.  She said how great it was and that it might be even better with the Inktense Blocks.  As I have the blocks we decided to arrange a day to play.

I bought myself a couple of cheap t-shirts in Asda and decided to put a face on them from  Doodles Unleashed by Traci Bautista.  In it she has drawn some faces to download for you (as she puts it) 'trace, doodle, embellish...', so I did just that.

First of all I blew the face up to A4 on my printer and placed it under the t-shirt.  You couldn't really see the lines til the t-shirt was wet.  The fabric needs to be wet for the Inktense to work properly. 

Then it was just a case of choosing colours and following the lines.  I found that the wetter the t-shirt, the more intense the colours became.  The colours also bleed into the wet areas, so I decided to use this a design feature.  This was when I uttered 'this is bleeding lovely' with out thinking.  What I meant was that it was bleeding really well.  Hence the title of this post!!

Thanks to Carrie for taking all of theses action shots.  Most of them were taken from the opposite side of the table which gives them a fab angle!!!

And here is the finished article...well sort of.  When I took the piece of paper out from under the t-shirt and turned it round, the purple at the left side of the face had leaked through to the back of the shirt.  Just never gave a thought to the colour bleeding through to the back.  Bit of a DOH moment!!!  Next time I've got to make sure that I use a craft mat under the picture too so no colour will get to the back ;)

As I'd already 'spoilt' the t-shirt I decided to splatter the front with Inktense.  I used a wet paintbrush and flicked it off the end of the pencil.  I used the same colours that I had for the face - Fuchsia, Tangerine, Violet and Teal Green.  I think I'm gonna just bleed some of the colours directly on the back and do some more splattering and it'll turn out just fine (I hope).

Next I had a try at Screen Printing.  I've never done this before and *loved it*!!  The designs Carrie had were pre-made little screens of leaves, so I just went into the paint and scraped it across the screen onto a bag-for-life Carrie gave me.

You don't need much paint, at least definitely not as much as I used as this was the result.  Its supposed to be a skeleteon leaf, but looks OK almost fully filled in.

I kept going with some more leaves this time using blue and green.  It was just so much fun!

This is the bag as it stands at the moment - a work in progress.  I left it at Carries for me to play with some more at our next play day!




After all of the talk about the Inktense Blocks, I didn't use them but Carrie did on what she was working on.  Have a peak over on her blog to see what she did :-)

We had a fab time.  Thanks Carrie!!!!