Ask Penny Halgren

Have you ever wondered what you might do with hand marbled or hand painted fabric?

Several years ago, I decided to learn how to hand dye fabric. It has been an excellent investment in time, since I gained a very in-depth understanding about color and value.

A natural spin-off of simple fabric dying is marbling, and quilting daughter, Stephanie, and engineering son, Bubba, and I spent hours on our patio with those plastic concrete tubs marbling fabric.

It is great fun to create the designs floating on water and then see it transfer onto the fabric.

Once done, we had a difficult time cutting up our artwork. And somewhat more difficult for me was how to use the fabric in a quilt. After all, shouldn't it be something really special?

The one summer, I went to a quilting retreat. I spent one day dying fabric and the next day in a workshop creating a quilt using a clamshell "block" design.

During the quilt workshop, I decided to take some of my hand dyed and hand marbled fabric and cut them up into a quilt.

The results are shown below.

As you can see, hand dyed, hand marbled and hand painted fabric can be used easily in a traditional patchwork quilt design.

	This is a really easy quilt to make. There are 9 patch blocks made from half-square triangles, alternating with the fish blocks. The fish blocks are 9 patches where one square replaces 4 smaller patches. Hand dyed and hand marbled fabric were used for the fish. In some instances, I took white on white fabric and dyed it creating an interesting print.
This is an example of a fish where the fabric has been hand marbled.
	In this hand marbled fabric, the swirl design is more symmetrical with dots of paint splattered after the design was created.
Each of the round fish in this quilt was made using hand dyed fabric. Most of the tails were cut from hand marbled fabric.
	Here is an example of the marbled tail and part of the hand dyed fabric of the fish body.

Here are pictures of some of the fabric I have hand marbled but not yet used in a quilt: