Create Your Own Hand Printed Cloth

Rayna Gillman works in mixed media on fiber, using a variety of surface design, collage, and printmaking techniques to integrate text and images into her work. She made her first scrap quilt in 1974, when she fell in love with an antique quilt she could not afford. Over the years, she began to print her own fabrics and became intrigued by the textures and design potential of such items as corrugated cardboard, construction fence, and kitchen tools. Today, using found objects from the house, the hardware store, and even the street, she paints, dyes, and discharges, working in layers to add complexity to her highly recognizable fabrics. Noted for her instinctive sense of color and her improvisational approach to design, she encourages students to work spontaneously, to experiment, and to use the question "what if?" to guide them. She has taught hundreds of students not only to print their own fabrics but also to use those fabrics creatively in their quilts. Rayna was a featured artist on the TV show Simply Quilts and has written for Quilting Arts Magazine. In addition, her work has been widely published. She was a juror for the national Art Quilts Lowell show and teaches internationally. Her fabric and quilts have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country and are in private collections in the United States, France, and Belgium. You can see her quilts on the web at www.studio78.net and www.galleryfxv.com. She invites you to visit her blog at studio78notes.blogspot.com.

June 08In Create Your Own Hand-printed Cloth, the fabrics are wonderful and inspiring, the instructions are easy to follow, and the ideas are abundant. Not only does Rayna teach readers the basics, she provides them with the information and tools needed to take their fabrics as far as creatively possible. Rayna draws on both 'standard' methods and new ones in her printing process. She also uses many materials that readers may have right at hand but wouldn't necessarily have thought to use in printing. With Rayna's lists of possible printing tools and the variety of printing techniques, readers are sure to find their way to wonderfully unique fabrics.