sewing at last!

Today's ATC - Painted and heat distressed Lutradur  free machined over chocolate and gold brocade.

And the show is over.  Over the weekend, I have had to learn to accept compliments gracefully, which is something I find hard.  Perhaps it an Aussie thing, to deflect compliments instead of basking in them, but I have always felt so embaressed when people compliment me.
Well, this weekend, I had lots of people I didn't even know compliment me on my work and I think I am getting the hang of just saying thankyou.  The blushing, well that's another matter, I can't control that, lol.

Hopefully, now I can have a few days in my studio to play.  I think I am suffering from withdrawal from not having any creative outlet!


Play every day!

a bit of plastic and some washers...

This was made on a felt foundation.  I used scraps of supermarket bags, layered, with holes burnt with a circle tip on the soldering iron and added some washers as well.  A bit of an experiment.
I have actually been to painting today, and worked on a few things, but since most are to do with my Tangled textiles challenge, I'll have to leave them for a later date.


Above all, create.

a meteor and some red stuff

today's atc began it's life as a sun.

... and became a meteor in the process - organza and cellofoil on black cotton, distressed with heat gun. echo quilting.

After my lazt day yesterday, I decided I needed to get some work done - ahh guilt is a great motivator!

I finished another three red button blocks.
For challenge 3 at Tangled textiles, I made a red quilt using buttons in Beryl taylor style you can see it here and here.
I actually designed too many blocks and so am putting together another one

I think I have already shown these two, but a refresher won't hurt.
The top one is on a bronze brocade, then a circle of gold sequin waste, squares of red and cream organza placed at 45 degrees to each other.  The cream organza is frayed.  next, four vintage mother of pearl buttons on the corners of the cream organza, and in the centre a circular metal filigree finding held down by a bead and sequin.
The bottom one is on red satin with two frayed cram/gold satin squares at 45 deg angle with a large pink vintage button and another mother of pearl button topped with a heart shaped brad.  The edge of each square was beaded with red metallic bugle beads.

This one was on gold satin with a bit of texture.  I made a gold lutradur flower for the really vintage button on this one, then made danglies fron bugles,and seed beads, with a red natural seed at the end of each.

This piece of fabric had a great harlequin pattern, which I used to space my buttons.  each yellow/gold diamond had a mother of pearl and a red button stacked and in the centre three red diamonds, I did some feather stitch in gold thread.

Since I missed TAST 2012 last week, this close-up can serve as a sample.

This piece of fabric had a japanese feel to it.  To keep along simple japanese lines, I just added stacked buttons to the three different areas and  put some twining cretan stitch in red and gold along the edges.

Here is a close up of my messy cretan stitch, which is this week's TAST 2012.


The pot of gold is not at the end of the rainbow, it is in the sewing room.

Perhaps not an utter failure

Thanks Gina, Renate and Caroline. 

Just to show you that I

1. do eventually get around to things
2. have projects that are failures

I have a little project to show you.
Way back in June, I designed this piece.

It has been sitting around, patiently waiting for me to play with it.

So got out my pattern and decided to make a little version, since the big one was not happening.  I traced the pattern onto acetate, so I could arrange things on my lutradur backing.

I added some water (A cotton fabric)

Rocks and more water in the foreground (more cotton).

Some more rocks and some more water (more cotton).

I tacked all these cotton fabrics down with a little free motion.

So far so good........

I added some cellofoil and sewed that down too.
I decided the rocks needed a few highlights and darks

 So I added some organza and satin.

Then a little more for the sea, with some ripped up nappy liners

And then more nappy liners

 I overdid the nappy liners because I know how they shrink to almost nothing...........

When you blast them with a heat gun!  So now you see why I used cotton on the underneath layers.
OOps! - too much nappy liner just turns into blobs.
I can see that getting the effect I got here

Requires a bit more experimentation. 
When I added little bits of nappy liner (and lots of cellofoil) I got a bubbly fluffy texture (above), but this time I used lots of nappy liner and not as much cellofoil.
In addition, this time I did not distress the cellofoil and nappy liner layers separately.
I could probably do some hand stitching to perhaps make something of this little piece,  however at this point, I will just set it aside and think on it again.

Sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the hill.
But remember, all you have to do is get up and walk there!  It might take some time, but you'll get there.

Cellofoil and water

Today's blog is about Fabric manipulation,  in particular heat distressing plastic.
I seem to have lots of this.

It is the plasticky foil wrapper from a rice cake packet.  I decided to see what would happen if I zapped it with my heat gun and was pleasantly surprised.

It becomes molten and soft and forms ridges and pools.  I thought it looked a bit like the crests of waves.
In the picture above, I have free machined the flat areas to a piece of Lutradur.

Here is a close up of one of the ridges and the round, flat puddles.

I cut up some watery looking fabric to put in the "puddles"

Here i have placed one of these between some ridges.

I did a little bit of free motion over these watery bits.

Then placed some more watery bits down.

I ripped up some nappy liners and started adding them next to the silver ridges.

I added a bit of the nappy liner strips.

Then I added a whole lot more.  I melted the nappy liner with the heat gun, and..

..it turned into froth, just what  I wanted.  This sample needs a bit more free machining and perhaps even some more nappy liner, since it disappears almost to nothing except a few bubbles, but I am very pleased with this experiment and will be tweaking it a bit more, I think.
 

A thunderstorm is approaching very quickly, so I will post this now, before the power goes out.
Happy creating.

Distressed Fabric Collage

Today, I have a collage I did yesterday to show you.  This one is an offshoot from the collage I did last week.
Both were layered with sheers and had leaves between the layers, but this one is distressed with the heat gun and is constructed slightly differently as a result.
The leaves were all cotton fabric, so they would not burn.  There were three layers of leaves covered with sheer and stitched.
Then came the moment.  And I burned all the sheers back.
I call this leaf litter.

The colours are not really true, Ifiddled around a bit, but I could not get them as bright as the original.  I think it is the way the light reflects off the surface.  A bit more fiddling will be required.

Hand Stitching on Tyvek samples

A few posts a go I wrote about creating textures on fabric using tyvek underneath (here).
With most of the samples, I felt they needed some embellishment to pretty them up.  so I have endeavoured to do this and  here are the results.

Here is the first.  If you remember, this was stitched in a grid with some of the squares filled in.  The filled in squares did not shrink.  I stitched around these squares and added a bead in the centre to define them.

For this sample, stitched in a wave and spiral pattern, I couched some machine wrapped cords over the stitched lines.  The green ones have the best contrast.  They all help to make the puffing look wavy.

For this one, I couched around the leaf shape which was heavily stitched and did not shrink.

With this sample, which was stitched in straight lines and created a shirred look, I tried three things.
At the top I have stitched over the stitching lines with a gold thread.
Next, I have couched some machine wrapped cord along the stitching lines.
At the bottom, I have beaded randomly on the stitching lines.
All three look interesting, especially the fact that the embellishments are sometimes hidden and sometimes peep out, but the beading looks the best.

This last sample was the one I liked the most.  Even though I stitched a shell pattern, the puffs created by the tyvek looked diamond shaped, so I couched down gold thread to emphasise the diamonds and beaded each intersection.  It looks very mediaeval.

Sometimes when we experiment with interesting textures and surfaces, we forget that stitch is an important part of the design process which can highlight, define and improve what we have done.
So, when your experiments don't look the way you thought they would, (and do they ever?) think about how you could use stitch to alter them or embellish them.

Even I, who can put 16 bobbins worth into a sixteen inch square of fabric, sometimes neglect stitch in favour of straight texture, but stitch gives textures character.

Add a bit of stitch to your world.

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