Patty Cake and butterflies

I have had these tiny little patty cake papers for ages and wanted to use them, so I finally made an ATC with them.  I think they're pretty cute.

About a week ago, I made these butterflies.

The one on the left is stamped on angelina and the one on the right is on lutradur.  I actually used several layers of lutradur and ironed them onto the inked stamp, which fused the layers together.  I also ironed the angelina, but it wasn't really needed.  The angelina butterfly has undergone a metamorphosis and look at it now.

It has become a journal quilt.  I free machined around it and cut away the excess, then quilted some lines, which did not fight with it as the focus.  Isn't it amazing how the background colour affects the angelina?

Angelina and an ATC album

Today's ATc is an angelina heart.  The fused angelina was ironed to fusible web and cut out then fused to the fabric.  Small stipple quiilting in the background, with a glue and gold leaf edge.

I have been collecting...

Toilet paper rolls in my recycling stash for mixed media work.  A few months ago, I thought "what if"  I flatten them to make little album pages.  So I did.

Here is a batch that were pressed under a brick for a week or so.
Imagine my surprise, when I was looking at youtube videos the other day, that a video about "Toilet paper roll mini albums" was  on the sidebar.
When I searched for "Toilet paper roll mini albums", there were lots and lots of videos by scrapbookers.
Just goes to show there is nothing new under the sun.

One thing I have found, though, is that these little pages are the perfect size for an ATC (so long as it is not too dimensional)  So, if, unlike me you have a small number of ATCs or a set from a group, these albums are the perfect low cost way of storing them and playing with embellishments at the same time.

Basically, you just cover each flattened roll (these ones are covered with scrapbooking paper, but you could use anything you want)

 Punch holes and set eyelets for a ribbon binding, or you could use strips of fabric to join pairs and bind them like a book.

One thing to watch out for is that some brands have different sized rolls.  It's probably easier not to mix sizes.

This two page sample above was made from the thinner rolls, and only a very flat ATC fits.

This is my finished sample.  As you can see, the ATC fits very neatly, in fact so neatly, that it is important to remember to add a piece of cord or ribbon as a pull in order to get it out.

Some ideas I have come up with are

• use one page as a mailer for fragile atcs
• decorate an atc and both sides to make a three sided atc
• bind a set of atc holders for a series of atcs on a theme

I'm sure there are a lot more ways to use these and I know there are as many ways to decorate them as people in the world multiplied by the number of ideas they can come up with.  Every one would be individual, just like ATCs.

Perhaps the main difference  between artists and those who don't consider themselves artists, is that artists make things just for their beauty and don't neccesarily need them to be useful.
A friend asked me today what I was going to DO with 365 ATCs and I think that above is my answer.
If art had to be useful (other than in lifting our spirits), then this would be a serious limit to creativity.

Bonded fibre film -Angelina

I had intended to blog about the workshop I did today with Neroli Henderson at ATASDA, and I will, but unfortunately, I am away from home for a few days and forgot to bring my card reader with me.  Silly me.  So you will have to wait for that one.  Needless to say it was great and a great group of people.
So, with no more ado, I will instead show you the first of the bonded fibres experiments.  In my categorisation of fibre films, these are the heat method.

As you might have noted, there is one further group after this.  The final type of fibre film at present is making films by manipulating fibre and fabric.  I have updated the Tutorials page so that all the fibre film tutorials up to this one are listed.

So, back to bonded fibre films.  The reason I call this the heat method is that, unlike the glue method, these films require heat to bond.  As fibre artists, we are blessed with a range of heat bonding methods.  Fusible webs, bonding powder, plastics and angelina are a few that come to mind.  My soldering iron applique method fits into this category as well.  This is the method I used to make the rocks in my first challenge piece for tangled textiles
The first one I am going to look at is angelina.

The first and most important thing (other than an iron, of course), is silicone coated paper, release paper, or baking paper as we call it in Oz.  All of these bonding agents could make a mess of your iron, so you need to protect it and your ironing surface as you work.
I usually roll off a large piece and pre fold it in half, so that I can fold it over the top of my layers before I iron

Above, I have spread a very thin layer of angelina on the baking paper (I did have a picture, but you could not see the angelina), then I have laid some threads and fancy yarn scraps over the top of the angelina.  I then laid another fine network of angelina over the top of this - to trap the yarns between.

Here, You can see the top layer of baking paper folded over the fibre layers.

After ironing, the angelina fuses together, trapping the yarns into a fine net.  When ironing these angelina films, I give the film only two or three quick sweeps with the iron.  If you keep the iron on the film too long, it will dull the shine of the angelina fibres.

So that is the basic method:

• a layer of angelina
• a layer of bits
• a layer of angelina
• baking paper
• iron briefly

The film can be stitched through quite easily, and it doesn't take much angelina to make a film.  My personal preference is less is better.  you can always add more if required, but besides thick films not looking as good, they are also harder to stitch.

Here are some pictures of a few samples:

This is the first film with a wide variety of threads and yarns.

This lovely sample trapped some skeleton leaves I found in the garden.

This one uses bits of foil from lolly (candy) wrappers.

This one uses snippets of light lutradur or rainbow spun.  All very shiny!

These are snippets of gold shot organza and crushed velvet.  Great texture.

This, is strips of coloured plastic bags.  The bags also melt and pucker.

And this last sample, the piece de resistance, is silk tops.  Using this method, it is possible to make extremely thin pieces of silk paper which will not fall apart and can be stitched down easily.  There is the added bonus of the sheen of the angelina setting the silk colours off.


Making these films can be addictive, you can use almost anything small and flat and they make lovely additions to art quilts and fibre art pieces.  I like to use them like a mat between a background and a small art piece.  They frame small work beautifully, but they can also be torn or cut up for inclusion in your work.


A little bit of shiny stuff goes a long way and can help to give interest to the focus of your piece. 

Fantastic Plastic

For Friday Focus this week, I experimented with supermarket rubbish bags.  Truly, I did.  Ever since i read Kim Thittichai's Hot Textiles, I have been dying to have a go at her techniques. She is an extremely well known textile and surface artist in the UK and has training in sculpture.  You can view videos of her here (you will have to log in but it's free) and here.   Some of the surfaces she creates and  those by others in the book are simply gorgeous.  I only played with plastic bags today, but there are all sorts of other synthetics to play with as well. What I experimented with was layering and fusing plastics with the iron. 

My technique was pretty simple.  I used a large leaflet of parchment paper on my ironing mat, simply put the plastic between and ironed.  Because the parchment paper is see through, I could see what was going on.  Most effects only needed one or two swipes with a hot iron, then peel off the parchment when cool.

One effect in particular which I really liked was in the encyclopedia of machine embroidery.  I have just taken the last hour to try and find it.  I thought it was bubble wrap and plastic with threads captured between, however it wasn't although it really looked like it.  I tried to get a similar sort of effect.

 

This is a blue shopping bag and bubble wrap layered together.  The white you see is holes (the bubbles burst from the heat)

This is the same but with some blue thread trapped between
I think the first one is closest to what I was after and with some free motion embroidery, would probably be excellent for bubbles under water (I see sea dragons in it's future).

This is some bubble wrap that had a green tinge to it.  I liked the way the colour formed around where the  bubbles were (how to make coloured bubble wrap).

I trapped some autumn leaves between two bag layers, it worked, but the leaves were very brittle and probably needed to be treated with some glycerine or PVA to stop them breaking otherwise any stitching would shatter them.

 

This is some of the plastic mesh bag oranges come in trapped between two layers.  It was interesting that it shrunk more when it was intact (top) whereas, at the bottom, it was loose and didnt' shrink.

Several layers of two colours layered in sheets

Many many layers of the green created this rocky sort of texture

This was made with lots of scrunched up pieces

This shows what happens with one or two flat layers.  The top one shows how the plastic opens up to create and airy texture, while the bottom shows how the plastic laminated with lots of layers.

This sample has many layers of plastic, but they are added one by one and have angelina layered between them.  Adding the pieces one by one allows the creation of the holes, which is a great texture, also shown below:

This is one layer of plastic ironed onto a non thermoreactive plastic (thick acetate).  I really like the way the bag plastic becomes an open texture like this.  If it is heated  on it's own between parchment layers, not only does it break up like this it shrinks.  It needs a substrate or a foundation under it to do this.
I really like this texture and have many ideas about using it, but I wanted to try one more experiment before the end of the day.  I overlapped pieces slightly on a sheet of fusible, then heated.  And look what I got!

 

This sample was the piece d' resistance.  All of the sheets have fragmented and the overlaps create wonderful colours.  The white flecks you see are holes in the plastic, not reflections.  My mind is now spinning with ways to use this new textile.  It can be ironed on to just about any surface and I really just want to get embroidering with it.  You will see this piece again in another work.
so I have had a very productive day, hope you did too