Coloring fabric with crayons

My clothes pin container gave up the ghost. At the beginning of the summer I saw some clothespin bags that people posted to their blogs so I decided to make one for myself. I took an old straw purse and used that for the template and used two layers of muslin to help the bag hold its shape, then decorated it with an iron-on transfer pattern that I colored with crayons. After I ironed the transfer on, I drew over the transfer outline with a Pigma pen for a black outline. Then I just colored in with crayons. I pressed fairly hard because the bag will be outside and I’m not sure how light sensitive the crayon dyes are. I sandwiched the colored part between paper towels and ironed it with a hot iron, changing the top paper towel until the paper towels had absorbed all of the wax and only the crayon dye was left. I’m happy with both the look and the usefulness of the bag. My friend was over, saw my bag and wanted one too. I used a different transfer for hers (a Bonnet Girl) and made tabs as she wants to thread hers on her clothesline while I wear mine like a shoulder bag. (Sorry the picture of my bag came out so orange).

This was fun to do and a nice, short break from hand quilting on the frame.

Added pix

I've added some pictures to the banner; excluding the pink star quilt, they are quilts that I did manage to quilt this year before the big weddding quilt. Inspired by our trip to the north of England last winter, I quilted the simple floral quilt with large cables and small cables in the blue bars. It is one of my favorite quilts, though I must admit, it doesn't photograph that well. It has a very soft, sweet look that just doesn't come through in a pix.

My New Blog

About me: Miri. I have been quilting for 19 years, teaching for about 15 and enjoying every minute of it. We now live overseas and I love how quilting is now worldwide-one of the reasons I enjoy teaching so much is my students come from all over the world and bring such different ideas, color sense and style with them to class.
I both hand and machine quilt; I made a resolution that this is the year I would work on machine quilting all those tops in the closet. One quilt a month was my goal-I did fairly well in the beginning of the year but then I began to work on the hand appliqué /hand quilted quilt for our son’s wedding. The wedding has come and gone (it was great fun) and the quilt is still in the frame about half done.
I did discover a wonderful companion for handwork: my MP3 player and audio books. I found this wonderful site: http://www.libravox.org/ that has free audio books for download-all books in the public domain, which means lots of classics. Sometimes you get one reader (the woman reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion is wonderful), sometimes you get different readers-I had different readers for Charles Dickens’ Bleak House but it didn’t bother me as I got so into the story that it just didn’t matter (and that is a book I tried to read years ago and found just hard going and didn’t get far). It is wonderful to have someone read to you.