Learning to Faux Batik

I was fortunate enough to take a class from Dawn Cavanaugh last week and I have to tell you I had so much fun!! I learned technique I had never tried before. We stamped fabric with foam stamps and water soluble resist, then dyed it by painting on thickened dyes.

Besides a really fun morning spent with friends from the Des Moines Area Quilter’s Guild, I also got 6 really great fat quarters of batiked fabric (and two not so good, but that’s ok).
Here they are (you can click to see a larger view):

Aren’t the colors luscious?! I was surprised at how brilliant they turned out! The square within a square stamp is one I made from foam tape! The rest were from Dawn’s collection. She had so many to choose from, that was almost the best part! Washing the fabric was the worst part…very time consuming.

Dawn really wants to see us make our dyes into quilts and show her photos…so you should see these fabrics again, in a quilt or two!! Hmmm. Any suggestions?

Oh, I have to say that Dawn was an amazing teacher! She was enthusiastic about the project, fun to listen to and really clear in explaining how to do each step. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to go to her class in Background Quilting, because she is known for her amazing machine quilting…but this dyeing project was no disappointment. THANKS SO MUCH, DAWN!!