Try It Out Tuesday : Remember That Piece Of Lutradur...?

Yes, this one... I talked about it here.  Well, finally, I got round to doing something with it.  I had it in my mind to stitch it to the quilt I talked about in that post, and then to burn it away, leaving only the stitch and the paint that I had patterned it with.  So, I started by cutting it down to size, so that only the patterning was left; I'll use the scrap pieces in other projects.  And I stitched it using bright pink thread, to tie in with the occasional pink strips in the quilt, and pink elements in some of the fabric.  It wasn't the most obvious choice, as it seemed to clash with the red of the paint, but it worked fine.  Sometimes it's worth taking a risk with thread colours; you can always remove it, or stitch over it (my preferred choice), if you really don't like it.  I followed the spiral patterning underneath, though not in a terribly regular way, knowing that it wouldn't be a problem because the burning would minimise the importance of the stitch.

Stitching done, I took it through to the ironing board.  I said that I'd planned to burn away the lutradur, leaving the paint behind, but I did wonder if perhaps it would be good to colour the lutradur before burning it, and leave traces of it behind.  So, hunting through my bag of painted papers, I found this;

I carefully separated the two motifs; this is a good idea, as it means you only iron the section you want to have on the cloth.  I chose the more diffuse, circular motif in preference to the spiral, as it was larger, and added more colour to the overall piece.  That seemed to work nicely... except...

...yup, the paper stuck to the lutradur...or maybe it was the paint... but either way, it left a nasty hole, bigger than the holes that burning with a heat gun would produce.  Rats. So I had to take that into account later, when I burned the piece.  To be honest, I've not had this happen before, except in a case where there was painted bondaweb on the piece.  My iron does get a little overheated at times; I suspect this is what happened.  But it's not a disaster, given that burning was my original intention.

So... I liked the addition of colour, so kept going, adding first some yellow, and then some more of the red swirls until I had a piece I was pleased with.  I don't think we think about adding colour after adding Lutradur (or any other bonded fabric) to cloth, but it's a really good way of getting pattern exactly where you want it, rather than having to fussycut a piece specially for a given area.

So now what...?  We'll continue this one on Thursday.