Mini Art Quilt Backgrounds

For the local shaker shop I did a series of mini art quilts on the theme of love. The background is a piece of muslin which is hand-dyed with fabric inks. I keep some powdered dye in spray bottles. I got the fabric wet in the sink, then crumpled it up and sprayed with different colors of ink. I squeezed them dry and then ironed them to set the color. Then I grabbed some artists acrylics and began stamping. The fun part was mixing colors--I'd still have some of one color on my brush and then I'd go to another, creating a subtle change. I used some great handmade fabric scraps with old sewing patterns on them to offset the hearts, then found my favorite scraps to cut out for hearts. These were ironed on the background with fusible web. Then I embroidered and beaded a little bit for interest. The text is hand stamped in permanent ink on a small piece of muslin. The whole thing was then ironed on to a piece of stiff double-sided fusible interfacing and onto a larger piece of plain muslin for a border. Wheee! Here are the backgrounds ready to create with.