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.

Memory book

Thursday is for Things to do.  Small projects which tend to serve as little breaks from work and keep the muse fresh.
If you know me, you know I am into just about everything. 
Toiday's project is a tiny memory book.

to begin with, here are a couple of little books I made recently.

As you can see, I do tend to use green a lot.
Both of the books are constructed using instructions from the new Cloth Paper Scissors Pages magazine.  This is so full of great stuff!  The one on the left (in the first picture, top in the second) uses a coptic binding to bind together acetate pages, into which I have placed pressed leaves.  There is an extra, white card attached with a ribbon to put under the page you are looking at since all the pages are transparent.
The other book (right in the first book and bottom in the second) is a paino hinge binding, which I find fascinating since all its needs is scissors and some bamboo skewers.  It is also flexible, because you can easily add more pages, so great for journals.
Of course, I can't show you these techniques, because they are published, but I put together a tiny memory book using acetate pages which is very cute.

I used acetate sheets which come in  A4/Letter size at office supplies.  For this book,  I cut the sheets into eight pieces, which I then folded into little leaflets.
One of the things that is neccesary in this book, is to secure the top and bottom of the leaflet so your memories don't fall out!

My first idea was to use double sided tape, but it shows a lot (top) even though it is supposed to be clear.  On the bottom, and this is what I did in my dried leaf book, I used clear tacky craft glue and pressed the pages until it was dry.  It worked quite well.
Here is what I used for this book.

Some covers cut from fabric paper and the acetate leaflets, and some ribbon for a tied binding.

First, I punched holes in the pages and the covers.

Next I used an awl to put sewing holes in the top and bottom of the leaflets.

I used some pearl cotton to sew the page edges.  In this book, I am leaving to tops open to allow addition of items as I wish.
I used pearl cotton, you can used stranded embroidery cotton, however it tends to be a bit less durable after a few pulls through paper or acetate.

Then I simply tied the book together loosely with the ribbon.

And your little book is ready to add memories or trinkets to.
As you can see, I have not finished the sewing.  This is an in front of TV job for tonight, lol.
For more ideas for dolling your book up with beads, ribbons, floss, etc, look at altered and fabric book sites and books, or just use your imagination!

today's inspiration

A couple of orchids which have just come out. I must remember next time to turn out the light in my studio.
Behind the top orchid, you can see some very old windows.  These are antique casement windows with cute little latch windows and they cover the outside wall and look out on all my special potted plants, like these orchids.

Be creatice
Vicki

Snow Gums

For my WIP Wednesday, I am showing you the first steps of a new large landscape I have been mulling over for a while.
In this case, I did not have a sketch or photo to work from, the idea had just been in my head for a while.  I started by placing a large 1400 by 900mm   (about 50  by 36 in) sheet of lutradur up on my design wall.

The lutradur is lightweight and a pale green colour.  I get it by the roll from the hardware where it is sold as weed mat.  I have recently started using this under my free machined work because it gives it body without bulk, so I don't need to use a hoop or add batting to do free motion work.  It is very similar to light lutradur and becomes softer with use, especially when you are doing hand work.
You can see above I have drawn a sketch of the tree straight onto the stabiliser.  I know this is a difficult picture to read, because of the transparency of the lutradur.  Here is a digital sketch of what is drawn on the stabiliser.

Better?  At least now you will know what I am talking about.  I traced this onto wide format printer paper with coloured markers as my pattern.

Above, I have the pattern folded and some tracing paper ready.
Of course we all know that when the moment comes to begin a new project, the perfect fabric is nowhere to be found.
I could not find any sky fabric which I really wanted to use in this piece, so I took some mid blue fabric and painted it with decolourant!

Here it is before the decolourant dried.

After ironing, looking good!

after washing out the decolourant.

And after the final iron.  This is pretty close to what I wanted, except perhaps a little blue still (this fabric did not go all the way to white - even with steam)  This gives me an opportunity to add more white with thread later.
So now I was ready to start putting up the sky.  I do try to start from the distance if I can, but since I am pinning my pieces not fusing or glueing this time (to allow more ease in the thread painting), I can easily add extras in at any stage.

Here I am tracing the sky areas of my pattern.  you can see that I don't worry too much about accuracy here as the layers will all overlap.  The arrows I have drawn outside the piece are to remind me of this overlap.

Next, I take my tracing and pin it to my sky fabric.  Then rough cut out the pieces with at least an inch extra.

Here are two of the rough cut pieces.  Remember, the arrows mean overlap.  No arrows means an edge of the whole.  In this case, the top.

Next, I trim the tracings back to the line.  ONLY the tracings, not the fabric.

 This is the reason why.  I trace around the shape onto the fabric with an iron-off pen.  This is to help me place the overlapping layer correctly later.

Then I simply place these pieces onto my foundation in the correct place ready for the next fabric, which will be all the hills in the distance.
That was a lot of writing, for something that really took a short time.  Needless to say it might be a few weeks before you see the next step in this sequence.

Just to finish off on a high note, here are a few photos of a very friendly King Parrot I had a chat with this afternoon.

Hello there, you don't mind if I just have a nibble?

If I promise only to eat weeds, would that be OK?

Of course, with all these weeds, I might have to stay a while...

No, No, I was not casting nasturtiums on your gardening skills!

Oh well, it was a lovely chat and I must visit again soon.  bye.

As you can see we had a lovely talk and it wasn't until I had gotten about a foot from him/her that  he/she felt the need to depart.

I'll be seeing you
Vicki

Digital brushes tutorial

As I promised, here is a quick tute on using brushes in photoshop or photoshop elements.
You can get sets of brushes free from lots of sites on the net - just type for example, "leaf brushes"  in google.
You will have to sift through a bit for the free ones, but it's worth it in the end.  also, you will need to find the correct directory to put them in on your computer in program files, so that Photoshop elements can find them.
There are also plenty of tutes on making your own brushes if you feel like more computer time -lol

I use photoshop elements.
First I open a blank document.

Then I use the rectangle tool to fill the background with colour.  This is optional, you can work on a white background if you wish, or add colour when you create the new image.

Next, I create a new layer from the layer menu.  You don't have to do this either, it's just easier to remove a layer if you don't want it later, rather than trying to edit specific things out after the design has become complex.

Next select the brush tool and choose a set of brushes from the drop down box

Then choose a brush.  Once you have clicked on a brush, when you move the cursor over your background, the shape of the brush will be visible.  It will probably be too large for your liking.  It always is for me.  Use the menu bar at the top to alter the size.

Now wherever you click, your shape will appear.  I like to use the leaves one at a time, although you can play with the cursor and make ghost trails etc.  Remember the undo command and also if you have wrecked a whole layer, just delete it and create a fresh one.  Here's my first, very bright layer!

Now, you can create a new layer and add on top of this.  I chose a different brush, size and colour for this layer.

One of the things I find annoying is if all the shapes are oriented the same.  This is another reason for using layers. I can rotate only this layer using the rotate menu.

So you continue on, adding different brush layers,  in different colours and rotations.

The more layers the more complex the fabric or paper you print will be.

Now that's a nice Autumn sort of fabric.
Have fun playing with this, but remember, the fibre is the thing.  A computer is no substitute for some fabric paint and your own creativity.

Hopefully tomorrow, I'll have some fibre stuff for you.

Time to begin again

Well, that was a long time wasn't it?
It's not that I haven't been working, I have, but it has been so hard to get back into my routine.
Best thing is to just do it.
I have learnt, during this hiatus, that my blog helps me to remember what I am working on!!!  
And of course that was the reason I started it in the first place - as a journal.
So where today?
On Mondays, I will endeavour to blog about some mixed media, which shouldn't be very hard, since I have been doing a lot of it.

Digi Fabric

I consider digital imaging to be part of mixed media.  In my case, it is a tool I use in mixed media, either to create papers, or to create fabrics.
I have finally got the hang of using brushes in photoshop and have been making a little bit of fabric.
Here are three brush fabrics which I love.

This one uses leaves, which is my current theme.

This one uses lots of different butterflies.

This one uses lots of speckly distress brushes and is much more controllable than doing it yourself!
Here it is printed on fabric.

This print highlights one of the problems with printing, which I forgot to do and that is to increase the contrast and select vivid colours when printing.
Another thing which also helps is to remember to increase the yellow - even if it looks too much, because yellow can be so easily sucked up by the other colours.  You can see that the main difference between the two pictures is the anount of yellow - And my printer has not run out of it.

Hopefully tomorrow, I will give you a quick tutorial on how to create these textures.
Because Tuesday will be tutorial day!
It's good to be back.