Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Fiber Art Wednesday

Hopefully, I am going to get more regular with this - each week I hope.
Today's collage is inspired by Melanie Testa and Deborah Boschert, as was the last one, here.
I started with a piece of textured furnishing fabric as my foundation, layered on some non woven stabiliser.  I get lots of my fabrics for collage at recycling places, as samples. 
I collected up some chiffon, lace and other little bits.
Then arranged them to form my background collage.  As you can see I am using a purple/green colourway, which is one of my favourites.
I stitched them all down free motion, using a green rayon thread.  The stitching is very simple on this one, just fastening the pieces down.
Then I took some lilac coloured sheer chiffon for the applique.
And stitched a leaf silhouette on it.
Then trimmed back around it to create a raw edge applique.  Don't cut too close, or you will be sorry - more about that later.
Then I started embellishing.
I did some seed stitching in the large green chiffon square with gold metallic thread, and added a little dragonfly made from knitted wire tube and some beads.  (hopefully I will do a tutorial on these later).
I also did some chain stitch curves and a spiral with a variegated perle thread.  I blanket stitched the edge with the same thread.
Now I hear you saying, what about cutting the applique too close?  I did cut too close in places and when I was doing the seed stitch, the applique came out of the stitches in places.  I repaired it with a little fusible tape, ironed under the loose bits, but the fusible was visible.  That was when I decided to add the dragonfly and the chain stitch.  They covered up my mistakes and finished the piece. Yes!
And here is the finished piece.  It is about 8x10in.  Of course I could have kept embellishing forever, but doing a weekly video makes me keep it simple, which is probably a good thing.

And here is the video


Happy Creating!