It has been a while since I posted any textile work. I have been working, but not anything finished to show.
So today I had my fifteen minute fix. It was one of those pieces that came together quickly, perhaps a bit more than fifteen minutes, but not much.
I do find that this often happens when I have nothing in mind; the ideas seem to come quickly when I throw away the rules.
I decided to look at some textile videos (I always have videos running in my studio) and the first which came up was Pokey Bolton's Needlefelting video. So I got out the embellisher.
I thought a tiny bit about what to do and feathers came into my mind (all those journal pages with feathers came to me) and I had a few ideas in mind, but when I went down to the machine, I saw a scrap of felt. My original idea was to use yarns to make the feathers (and I still might do that), but on the shelf nearby was some gorgeous silk weave that a friend had given me (saying " You'll think of something to do with it")
Perfect!
So I cut some feather shapes out and just needlefelted them down with the embellisher.
You can see the gorgeous woven texture of the silk in this picture. I paid a lot of attention to the edges when I was needlefelting, which made them fray nicely.
When I had done that, I threaded up with Black thread and free motioned over them to make the stems and some side branches.
At this stage, I knew I needed more, and indended to do some sheer raw edge applique, but all my sheers were all still in the car from teaching a class and since it is 42 steps down and 42 steps back, I was too lazy to go and get it.
Opportunity! I saw a feather stencil sitting on my journaling table and thought, let's add some stencilling. The lumiere paints were just there so I used them, intending to add a bit of bling.
You can see in the photo above that a strange thing happened. In the felt, the paint took on the base colour (this was rose gold) and the silk took on more of the metallic part of the paint.
WOW! I loved that, so I tried a few more colours.
This was the blue gold and it did the same thing. I also used violet gold, but I didn't overlap it much, so I didn't take a photo.
I still felt it needed more and got some beads out, but as I sat down to start, I saw some candlelight thread I bought on a recent trip. YUM! so I embroidered some feathers - using feather stitch of course! I also added a few feathers in the colours in the silk fabric - yellow, red and blue.
And that is where I am at.
I am not sure where to go next - whether to add more stitching and what method for binding. I am leaning towards beading the edge and adding some seed stitch, but you are welcome to leave suggestions.
And that was my fabric fix.
Happy creating!
