waterfall 2

Well, i have done a little on my waterfall since last week.  At the moment I am busily preparing to go away for a few days.  I have had to put my planned blogs back a bit, I will still be blogging, only they will be some blogs I prepared earlier, then back to normal on Saturday.

I have couched the falling water in place, although I will add a little more, including some angelina to the waterfall and the foam.  The white of the foam is too stark, and needs to be added to.  The ripples in the pool turned out well.
Even though I see things that I feel need altering, I will not do it until I can see the whole piece together.  The dark cliff and the ferns and other lace that need to go on will alter the movement and the focus, so it is best to wait.
Welcome to my new followers, you brave things, keep tuning in as I have a few things ready to post whilst I'm away.

Waterfall WIP

As I said, Wednesdays will be work in progress day. The day when I show you how I go about creating my fibre art pieces.
Today I worked on a landscape with waterfall collage that I designed for my Quilt uni course.

 This is the original idea sketch in my journal.  It is a simple scene with only a few elements and uses the golden rule in composition.  There is a rocky cliff on the left, A waterfall with pool in the centre, and rainforest and ferns on the right.  The ferns are in the foreground, covering the other side of the cliff.  There will also be a dragonfly buzzing around somewhere.

This is my sketch on interfacing 18x14 in.  I have already placed some hand dyed fabric for the sky.

The brown fabric, another hand dye, is what I will use for the cliffs.  On the left is a close up of my sketch of the rocks on the fabric.  This fabric will be extensively thread painted, then trapuntoed to give dimension before I put it on the background.

The green mottled fabric will go under a large amount of FME lace representing trees and ferns in the foreground on the right.

This is my tucked fabric for the pool at the bottom of the scene pinned ready to sew the ripples in, and on the right, pinned in place.  The pool is contructed of an organza overlay over a navy blue piece of cotton, so that when the ripples are sewn in, it will appear to hane depth.

These are a variety of yarns and threads which will be couched in place for the waterfall.  In the picture on the right they are sitting in place and also to the right of them, is some of my Fibre film from yesterday which will form the moss at the edge of the pool.

As you can see, Most of the pieces require some work before the piece can be assembled, and at present it is still only a plan and looks like quite a mess.
Creating art is always about give and take.  At this stage I like how I imagine the pieces will fit together, but you must always be open to change.  Our minds are always learning new things and new ways to do them, so when you look in next week, I cannot guarantee my plan will be the same, however, I hope the piece will be a little closer to being finished and starting to look like more than a mess!

Water, Water, Everywhere

You know, the main reason I set up my blog was to keep myself on track.  So I have finally made myself up a routine to follow so I get things done in all the many areas of my interests.  My Friday Focus (forgive my alliterations as I am partial to them) is where I intend to post about new techniques and experiments, be they fabric manipulation, surface techniques, sewing, etc.
This week i am posting about manipulating fabric for texture and depth.  In my Quilt Uni course, this week we are looking at scrunching fabric and I got to thinking about folding and pleating techniques.  I got an idea for pleating a strip pieced fabric to get an impression of water.
In my first experiment, I used three values of  2.5in blue fabric

I strip pieced these and pressed the allowances to the dark, then cut them in half

I joined these together

And then sewed pleats in at the seams

I then tacked the pleats up and down to create waves

Although they do look like waves, they were a little too regular for me, so I untacked it and tacked it differently, alternating the ups and downs on each row

I like this one much better, the curves are more pleasing, but it was still a bit too regular, so I did it again...

This sample was a bit more to my liking, and with a bit of Free motion and some embellishment, would be OK.
However, I still wanted more wavy sort of Textures, so I started again with some thinner 1.25 in strips

This time, I did not strictly pleat, but used a piece of iron on stabiliser smaller than the fabric and ironed random pleats into place on it

I started free motion scribbling on it, but It was too uneven and thick in places, so I sandwiched it between tulle layers and put it in a hoop

It was still difficult to free motion, but I finally got something approaching what I wanted

With a bit more embellishment (and practice)  this would be great for a sea landscape.
The next thing I wanted to make was some water in a  river pool.  My idea was to create curved tucks around a central point, however I got something quite different.

As with my second sample, I used a piece of interfacing smaller than the fabric.  then I used a basting stitch to crumple the fabric into the smaller space.  This is a slight modification of one of the techniques in the Quilt uni Course, but is called furrowing in the art of manipulating fabric by Collette Wolf (Which is my bible for such things).  It is also similar to making twisted roses in Fantastic Fabric Folding by Rebecca Wat or chopkeys in Folded fabric elegance by Rami Kim  and
here is the final sample

I did like the texture better before pressing as it was softer and more fluid.  However after some stitching to stabilise, it could be pouffed up again
I still hadn't worked out how to get my curved pool tucks, but as i was writing this it came to me, so i went and did a quick sample

I cut a wedge shape and gathered along the edges, then rolled the gathers into curves by pushing the gathers to the to and the centre of the tucks to the bottom, and voila!   With a wider wedge and some stitching in between the tucks to define them, it will be just what I want.
I have designed a small quilt/hanging to use some of the techniques in the course and I will try and remember to post it on Sunday, 'cos Sunday is sketchbook day.
Tomorrow is Stitchin' Saturday and I will look at a Free motion stitch in detail.