Photo Friday : Winter

This beautiful piece was made by Maggi Birchenough: this is what she has to say about it.

"The piece was made in response to a competition run on the Popular Patchwork Forum to create something using the 'new' fabric Zeelon. The image is one of my own photos, taken of me on a the beach in Brighton on a lovely sunny winter day. It has always been one of my favourites and I had thought about using it with a poem overlaid but hadn't managed to find the right overlay fabric, until I discovered the lovely transparent  quality of Zeelon. Because I didn't manage to get any Zeelon until a couple of days before Christmas, (having traveled to pick it up from Spunart after their Christmas party!), I was very short of time as the closing date was Dec 31st and I was working all through the Christmas period from 21st - 28th December. This influenced my decision to print the image onto tea bag paper rather than direct to the Evolon base. I was familiar with that method of printing but hadn't done any onto Evolon before and just didn't have time to experiment. I bonded the tea bag paper to the Evolon using acrylic matte medium. The Zeelon was a dream to work with. I gave it a wash of blue acrylic and Koh-i-Noor water based dyes, spray basted it to a piece of printer paper and printed off the poem and the title. I attached the Zeelon layer with straight stitch and French knot embroidery and then added embroidered 'stars' around the figure with a silver metallic thread. I burned away the Zeelon around the figure with a soldering iron.

I was pleased with the way in which the piece came together but would definitely work straight onto Evolon for the base image in the future, especially having seen the effects that you have achieved. I also felt that the contrast where the image was revealed was not particularly obvious. Something to re-think to get a bit more definition in the future.  It is A4 sized and once the idea had been formulated came together very quickly. The aspect that took the longest was writing a suitable poem. It did win the competition incidentally so looks like I'll be popping down the road to Spunart for another order soon."

 

If you have any questions about this piece, please post them here, and Maggi will, I'm sure, respond.  If you want to contact her directly, you can do so here .  Thank you, Maggi...it is a lovely piece of work, and it's great to hear the story behind the making of it.