Batik Tambal

Last night, I visited another guild in my area (which I have decided to join as a member next month). They had a speaker who presented a neat hands-on workshop.
The speaker was Trish Hodges, from Batik Tambal here in the Hartford area. She talked for a few brief minutes about how Batiks are made, then she showed us some tjaps (chops) which are copper stamps dipped in wax to print the batik design. Instead of using hte tjaps for batiking, she showed us how to use them with Shiva Paintsticks. We putthe tjap under our fabric, secured it with an elastic then did a rubbing over the top of he tjap, much like we used to do grave rubbings or rubbings of veins on leaves when we were kids. I'd show you mine, but I need to wait for it to cure a few days, then heat set it.
I'm kind of thinking that I'll use the little pieces I did last night as the beginnings of some fabric postcards. We'll see...

On another note I have four quilts ready to stick in a box and send to Kansas. Luckily, I still have some quilts here that haven't been donated yet. Most of these I have left were deemed 'too big' for the local Ronald McDonald House, so I was planning to send them elsewhere. However, they are being diverted to Kansas. Tornados are not something that we experience here in CT (not impossble, just very unusual), but to me, they seem like the scariest of all possible weather disasters. Sure, hurricanes are scary, blizzards can be scary too, but with both of those, we get days and days of warning. With tornadoes, that just doesn't happen. And even more scary is the pictures you sometimes see of a flattened house with the house immediately next door totally unscathed. The quilt pictured here (the double four patch) is destined for Kansas. I'll share pictures of the others I'm sendng as soon as my camera charges enough for me to take pictures.