PaintStick “Appliqué”

When Wendy and I lead tour groups, we always have at least one project to teach while we’re traveling. Our recent cruise to Hawaii was a bit of a challenge concerning this topic because the ship traveled from island to island during the night and we had almost all of our daylight hours available to explore the islands. This was a good thing – Hawaii is a great place to have time in the sun :-). But, on most of our other trips we had a day or two “at sea”, giving us plenty of project time.

We were able to “squeeze” in two class sessions this trip, so we needed a fun project that could be accomplished in a short amount of time. What we came up with was Hawaiian Appliqué done with paintstick stenciling. I know I’ve posted this photo before, but this time I’d like to share a bit about the technique.

What’s so exciting about this technique is that the Shiva™ Oil Paintsticks are actual oil paint in a crayon form. They create beautiful designs that are permanent on fabric. Therefore they can be used on garments as well as quilts. It’s a wonderful way to put designs on fabric/clothes, but words could be stenciled too! Just imagine the possibilities!

I chose to put my Hawaiian design on a t-shirt.

So – here’s how: The first step was to create the pattern “paper snowflake” style using freezer paper.

This was opened up to reveal the pattern and ironed onto the fabric, shiny side down.

Then we colored along the paper edge with a paintstick, and dragged the paint onto the fabric with a stencil brush.

The results were great – and everyone got them done in the time we had available. We will be having a cruise reunion in April and we’re hoping everyone will bring their finished quilts for show-and-tell. I’ll post pictures at that time!