I recently picked up a book “Twelve by Twelve: The International Art Quilt Challenge”  about a two year long  challenge conducted by twelve art quilters. (Buy it here: Twelve by Twelve: The International Art Quilt Challenge  ).   The entire challenge was conducted online.  A theme was selected by one member, and all the members had two months to produce a 12 inch by 12 inch quilt based on that theme.  After the challenge was completed, the members published this book.  All the members discuss their thoughts about the challenge and how they arrived at their particular quilt design.  It is very interesting reading, and very thought provoking if you want to be an art quilter.

A number of interesting techniques are described in the book.  One I found intriguing — and compatible with some of the things I have been doing this year – was a technique described by Terry Grant.  She used pastel pencils to add shading to commercial fabrics to get a more realistic result.  I just played around with this idea today and can see how it works.  According to Terry, after you are satisfied with the result, the shading is made permanent by painting over it with a dilute solution of acrylic textile medium and water.  I haven’t tried that part yet, but here is the result from spending 30 minutes or so adding the shading with  white, navy blue, and black pencils .

fused applique pieces have a flat appearance

dimensionality added with pencil shading

Interesting!  This is much like what I was doing last spring with my sliced circle pieces with crayons and Shiva Paintstiks.  At that time I settled on a  white Paintstik to get the best white highlight on the spheres.  The pencil result here is quite good and much faster, if it will truly be permanent after covering with the textile medium.