A little bit of everything

I have not really been very productive lately, although I know some of you won't believe that, however I have really been doing a lot of reading and staying away from the computer.  I recieved two books from Kim Thittichai recently- "layered Textiles" and "experimental textiles", which I have been enjoying immensely.  Layered textiles is about creating wonderful textures using many layers, heat tools, stitching and lots of other stuff.  To that end, I have been painting non woven fabric such as light lutradur, fusible, nappy liner, tyvek and rainbow spun.

These are a few samples.  The top one is nappy liner, which I spayed with my air gun.  The bottom two are fusible, painted with acrylic.  You can see on the middle picture I have ironed some glitter onto the fusible.
I wanted to create a water effect and tried a few different ways with the nappy liner.

I ironed the nappy liner down after cutting it with a heat tool.  It created an interesting effect, but as you can see in several places, I was a bit impatient waiting for the baking paper to cool and some came away with my blue nappy liner still attached.

In the sample on the left, I ironed the pieces onto interfacing, but the iron was too hot and the interfacing wrinkled up.  Ah well, we live and learn.  In the right hand sample I just layered strips of coloured nappy liner on cotton and cut into it with the heat tool.  This created while lines, and might be useful if I want to make foam on the waves in a sort of heat tool reverse applique.

I used some of the fusible in this piece.  I ironed it onto a yucky beige fabric, which I had painted ages ago and it created the orange squares behind my leaves.  In fact when I had ironed it on the fabric, I loved the marble like effect so much, I had to create something with it, so I cut lots of leaves from my huge collection of baby wipes which I use to mop up my paintin messes, then dry.
This piece is just fused down and sitting next to my free motion machine for stitching.

This is my sample for the stitching, which I made from left overs.  I used purple and turquoise thread, but I think a little orange and gold will not go astray as it is a little flat at present.
The stitching was inspired by "retro inspired stitch samplers" by Jackie Cardy in the jun/jul 2000 issue of Quilting arts, which has been sitting in my to do pile for a long time.
I didn't forget the other book I was reading, "experimental textiles", it is full of yummy samples and is really about sketchbooks for textile art.  I have been reading it together with another two books, "sketchbooks for embroiderers and textile artists" by kay greenlees, and "dreaming from the journal page" by Melanie Testa as well as doing Melanie's online course "dream Journal".
Wow, that was a mouthful and a lot of links to paste in!  But I am, as you might gather, spending a lot of time in my sketchbooks at present.  I also am watching "Internationally inspired" from donna downey, so I suppose I am doing stuff, it's just it's all very paper oriented, lol.

This is a quick sample from Melanie's course, where I am testing out different media, like watercolour, watercolour pencils, pastel pencils, water soluble wax and oil crayons, and crayola slicks, which are a bit like gelatos.

These two are pages from my journal, where I was just playing.

This page from my sketchbook is a few insects I was playing with.
At our art group at our community house we have been doing some beading, and these are two little bits I made.  I have made a few more, but haven't photographed them, and will show you next time.

I think that's enough for one post.

A harlequin and some painting messes

This one was inspired by lisa's one here 
When I found these little bits of card already cut into diamonds, I knew what I had to do!  Luckily they fit nicely across one way.  When I was looking at it deciding whether to put another row cut in half, I had a lightbulb moment and thought about the stitching.
Black cotton, glitter coloured card, perle thread.

And some more painting!!!
After I had printed on all the different surfaces, I decided to paint the scraps to use in collage.

Light Lutradur.  I liked the way the watercolour bled here.

A few face wipes.  I was dropping watercolour onto damp fabric from dropper bottles.  With these, I scrunched them afterwards to blend the drops a bit.

A gorgeous piece of inferfacing.

A piece of fusible.  This might come in handy as an overlay in a landscape as it is so subtle, but really, my watercolours were too dilute for the normal painted fusible effects....... but

This is the release paper. and I am in love with this!  I will just have to try and repeat it.  Obviously, if the paint is too dilute, it just settles into the paper, but this paper is gorgeous.

A nappy liner, which is very pastelly and had a similar problem to the fusible.  Too many holes, but is very filmy and nice.
and a last piece of interfacing, which was a bit too wet, but again had lovely edges where the watercolour dried.
At least with these,  I can always add more layers if  I'm not happy, but all in all it was a productive session.

Lots of materials for fabric collages!  Perhaps I'd better make a few.
I am going away for a few days, to visit with my mother, but will still be posting.

As Lisa says, be creative

Some origami and some more printing

mono printed fabric, origami hexagon in white satin, bead, transparency transfer The transfer is the japanese character for 'folding'.

When I was printing on the tissue paper, I also tried some other surfaces that I had been going to do for a while.  And, yes, Judy, one of them was fusible, lol.  thanks.

This one was printing on light interfacing.  The main problem I had with this is that the rollers pulled the fibres off the surface and jammed the machine.  In the end, I had to fold a piece of tissue and fix it at the top, so the fibres didn't catch, and as you can see, I got a good print - missing the first inch or so of course.

 This one was on Tyvek and it worked extremely well.  The print was really sharp and clear.

This was on nappy liner, and although it looks as though it printed well, most of the ink went straight through and only a wer faint print remained.  This is just too thin!

This one was on fusible and printed really well.   This is one of the things I had been wanting to try for ages.
This picture also highlights something I learned whilst doing this.  The paper you use as a carrier does not have to be a full lenght.  you can see here, I have reused a piece of paper and it is shorter because I cut off the previously glued  bit at the top (which is now the bottom)

This one is on a polyester non woven (or light lutradur)  This tended to bleed a bit.  After I had done it, I remembered that it is better to coat it with some medium or PVA before you print to get a sharper print.  I'm pretty sure you told me that, Judy.  As you can see a lot of the ink went straight through - although this paper will make a nice distressed print for collaging.

This one is a heavy Lutradur and i didn't use a carrier for it.  It went through and printed well, except, where it had been folded in the packet, tended to pick up ink from the heads.  I will have to work out a way of getting the folds out, perhaps a warm iron with a bit of mist?  or pressing under some books.

The last one is tyvek paper, which also did not need a carrier.  It has a totally different texture to tyvek fabric and appears more like a very smooth lutradur, which has been pressed.  (Which it probably basically is as they are both polyester fibres.  Although the image was good, it did bleed a little.

So now, my poor printer has printed on just about everything over the last year!
As you can see, I have done most of my prints at around ATC size, so you will probably see many of these prints cropping up through the year.  I'm sure to manipulate them in unimaginable ways, so you might have too look hard to recognise them, lol.


“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” — Edward de Bono

Another leaf and some painting

today's ATC is another leaf!!
Felt, Wire, Silver thread, green stranded cotton, running stitch, couching, chain stitch.

I was looking at  the colouricious site in response to their newsletter, and found a gorgeous landscape by Ineke Berlin.    This one is also gorgeous, too.' 

Ineke uses Lutradur for her landscapes and because it is a non woven fabric, there are no fraying problems.  I thought I would have a go at it.  I have lutradur, but I looked around to see what other nonwovens I had.

I found some nappy lines, some face wipes and baby wipes and for good measure, I added some tea bag paper.

Since they were all very thin, I layered them up, so that ant paint going through would go onto the fabric below, and I decided to use the kids paint brushes I bought the other day. (Instead of throwing out the paint - nothing goes to waste around here!)

Here is a baby wipe painted.  I was using primary colours, nothing very nature like about that, but I will show you how I changed the contrast and colours in a bit.

Tea bag paper - very translucent and yummy!

and some nappy liner - you can see here the colours are much more natural and the contrast is more blended in.  I did this by doing something I often do when painting fabrics for landscape.  I roll the fabric together to blend the paints.  In these two above, I rolled the fabric into a sausage and then rolled it between my hands.  In other samples, I scrunch and roll into a ball and roll between my hand, and this gives a more blotchy pattern rather than the streaks you see here.

My group of tea bag papers.  Because these were so see through, I didn't blend the colours by scrunching.)

Here are some of the face wipes and baby wipes.  you can see the bottom right, green one was scrunched rather than rolled.

More baby wipes and some nappy liners.  The two nappy liners at the bottom show clearly the difference between rolling and scrunching with these very thin materials,

All in all, a very successful session.  Now, I need to do a bit of work on my sketch of the creek, which is what I want to use this for.  and start cutting ripping, arranging and sewing.  Hopefully, I'll have something to show by next week, although I still have one deadline today week to get done!  (It will be down to the wire as usual for me)

An ATC a day keeps the world at bay!
Go see lisa's ATC

Distressed nonwoven leaves

I have been working on some distressed leaf samples for a few days.
Basically, I gathered a range of non wovens and a few synthetics.
I painted the non woven fabrics.  The synthetics were all coloured.
I free machined two simple leaves on each fabric - a leaf with veins and a leaf without veins.

Then the fun began
I used the soldering iron to put holes in the leaves with veins
I used the heat gun to distress the leaves without veins

And here's what I got

This first sample was a synthetic, crisp, organza type fabric in an olive green.  The holes in the leaveswereeasy to cut, but when I used the heat gun, instead of bubbling or creating holes like most organzas, I got these wierd lines, like one of the warp or weft melted and the other way didn't.  This leads me to think that this is a type of shot organza with two different fibres going in the two directions.  Interesting.

The next sample was a crepe like chiffon fabric.  The hole burned very quickly, so care was needed and the veinless leaf shrank to half.  however there was some puckering in the unstitched fabric,so I cut a leaf from that, too.

This third synthetic was a chiffon, but crisper than the one above.  You can see it behaved in a very similar way.  I  varied the way I made the holes with the soldering iron to see what different effects I could get.

This is a beautiful,  gold  rainbow spun or light Lutradur.  It was easy to cut through with the soldering iron and reacted quickly to the heat gun, making holes inside the stitched area.  You can see on the right, that in unstitched areas, it bubbles.

The next sample was weed mat from the hardware.  This behaves in a very similar way to light lutradur (I suspect it is a form of lutradur sold as weed mat.  It even looks and feels like lutradur)

This sample is tyvek.  My treatment of this sample is slightly different to the others.  All went well with the soldering iron,  but my heat gun is extrememly hot and I know from experience that it will shrivel my tyvek up into nothing.  The unveined leaf was ironed rather than heat gunned.  There is a leaf cut from heat gunned tyvek at the right.  Very dense.

Although this face wipe looks woven, I suspect it is actually needle punched or bonded.  It looks and feels  like other non wovens, so I did a sample.  It burned with diffculty and you can just see some charring around the holes.  It did not melt but burned as you can see in the open leaf, so I suspect that it has some polyester, but also has cotton or other cellulose fibes in it.  It was worth a try.

Here is another type of face wipe, which behaves in exactly the same manner.

This very distressed sample is frost net.  I believe it is what the english call agricultural netting and also that it is very similar to nappy or diaper liner.  It distresses very very easily.  I would use the soldering iron, but not the heat gun - at least not when there are areas bounded by stitch.  You can see how the heat gun dissolved the fabric inside the stitching in the open leaf.  However in areas not bounded by stitch it shrank and frothed up as you can see at right.  I have used it this way to make froth for seaside pieces and it works well.

The final sample is heavy lutradur.  It distresses extremely well and the holes in the open leaf were really easy to make with the heat gun.

So, now I know how all these fabrics react to the soldering iron and the heat gun and I will most definitely be using some of these in my leaf project.

Don't get stressed - distress some synthetics