Today I finished or almost finished a couple projects I’ve been pecking away at.  Here’s the story about me and Inktense watercolor pencils which I call Coloring Between the Lines.

testing

I first purchased my Inktense pencils last September, played around with them, made some colossal mistakes and armed with just enough information to get me into more trouble I tried it all again.  First I got semi organized.  Scribble with the pencil, label the number, write down which pencil you are about to use instead of trying to remember it.

Secondly dive in.  Quilt up a couple of pieces and go for it.  A few days later go online to see what other quilters are doing.  Big mistake – I now see, from a few different sources,  people are using a fabric medium to wet the fabric before using the pencils.  So here is the scoop, I put mine on dry.  This works just fine except for fabric drag and you can see the lines where you stroked.  But….this works for me. My colors are probably not as intense because they are not as heavy but I’m okay with this, too.

Daffodil Inktense pencils

I like the lines through the leaves and the edging on the flower.  I have to be very careful when adding water not to let the inks bleed into the background fabric but that is a factor however you apply these pencils.  I actually add water with one hand and keep the hair dryer in the other. I mistakenly thought the thread from the quilting would act as a bit of a barrier but, of course, it doesn’t.  Overall I’ve had only a couple of bleeding issues that I need to “fix”

Spring Daffodil

Spring Daffodil is now ready for background quilting.

Flower Basket close to finished

This is the second project.

The thread does not color well and you can really see that in the leaves.  I solved it later with a sharpie.

Trailing curly lines from the leaves were another problem.  Finally settled on a crayon to add just a hint of color at those points.

Decision time

The fuchsia/violet curled frame ended up more vibrant than I intended so I decided I had to color in all the feathers I had already quilted around it.  Because I wanted to keep this light I settled on a couple of old fashioned crayons which I could control a bit better. This was the first sample.

It is now finished, the binding is on and ready for handwork tomorrow evening.