It's all about Heart and will you just look at what Cherry did in teaching us how to: Make your own fabric

Thanks Madame Samm for inviting me to share my little heart project with you all. My name is Cherry and I blog over at Cherry Blossoms. I have been playing with art quilting for a little while, and today I want to show you how I used fabric pens to make my own fabric design.

These are the supplies I used:

 

 high thread count fabric - I used 200 ct Pima Cotton (don't wash the fabric)

mechanical pencil

black Micron pens in sizes 05 and 005

Fabrico Dual-Tip markers in various colors

Freezer paper

Your own drawing or Clip Art

a light box - optional

For my little quilt, I used Clip Art I found in my publishing software, but you can always use any drawing you choose; in the future, I plan to make a quilt with some of my children's drawings. This is also a great way to make labels for your quilts. The markers are acid free, fade resistant, and will not wash away, and  best of all, the fabric stays soft!

I found these images 

and played with them until I was pleased with the arrangement, color, and size

for the word I used a pretty font, enlarged the letter "A"

and for the "o" used the little heart image after cropping the stem and leaves out

Next, I changed the color to grays and printed it out

Now the fun begins...

first, cut a piece of fabric several inches larger than the design

and tape it on to the paper to keep it from moving during tracing

Using a light box, trace the design on to the fabric using a mechanical pencil

Remove the paper from the back... 

To make the "coloring" process easier, iron the shiny side of freezer paper

to the back of the fabric with the drawing, this way you won't be stretching the fabric with the markers

Now that the fabric is nice and stable, start tracing over the pencil lines with a black Micron 005 pen.

Once you've done this, the next step is very important: you must heat-set your Micron ink with a dry iron.

If you don't do this, it will run when you start coloring with the Fabrico Markers

Make long, light strokes when coloring with the Fabrico markers;

you can always come back and darken any areas by coloring over them again

 That was so much fun!!!

Of course, to be a quilt, it most have a little batting, a backing, and some thread to hold it together,

and since I don't plan to wash this one, I drew some quilting lines for the wall and floor using the mechanical pencil, giving it a little bit of shading

I used white thread for the whole thing and, yeah, made a few mistakes where the white thread showed on the dark coloring, so I just went back and "covered" my little mistakes with the markers...
...Oops! don't tell!

Add a little binding and hanging tabs...

And you're all done!

You've got to try it, you'll feel like a kid again...

Hugs,