One of the women in my quilt group works with honeybees in a government lab; she likes bugs. When there’s a birthday in our group, that person gets a piece of fabric (generally a fat quarter) in their favorite color or style. Diana requests fabric with bugs. I totally spaced out her birthday last year, so I thought I would try making her something this year for this week’s meeting.
First I drew a bee with pencil, so I could make a thermofax screen:
Here you can see a piece of my hand-dyed pink fabric pinned down to some foam core out on my patio; I’ve just screen printed the honeybee shape on the fabric, and you can see the small and rather sloppy screen–with a “frame” made of duct tape– off to the right. I’d say the bees are about 3″x5″.
To make up for missing last year’s birhtday, I also screen printed a similar-sized piece of orange fabric using fuschia dye this time:
I kind of sponged around the areas where I glopped on some dye paste during the printing process. Sloppy! I figure this fabric could come in handy for some picky-piecing, if one wanted to highlight bees for some reason in one’s quilts.
