Photo Friday : Gum Flower

Thanks to Dianne Nunn, who has shared this lovely project with us.  I asked her to tell us a bit about it; she said:

First I should explain that I designed this myself as I went along.

A friend sent me some evelon to try and I thought I would start with something simple.

First I drew one leaf on the evelon using a pencil and included a central vein.  I then stitched the outline on my sewing machine.  Once I was happy with the outline I laid some wool fibres (wool rovings) over the evelon and used my needlefelting hand tool (5 needles) to secure the fibres building up the surface with some more wool, some silk fibres and some thread.  With the first leaf I outlined it with some very fine green twine couched down with silk thread (although this pretty much disappears into the surface.

When it was finished I added a few red beads and burnt some holes in the piece to replicate the condition of many eucalyptus (gum) leaves and finally cut the shape out with my soldering iron.  I was thrilled with the fact that the evelon cuts so cleanly with the soldering iron.

The second leaf is a lot more simple – just fibres over the shape added using both the hand felting tool and my pfaff embellishing machine before cutting out.  

This was really an experimental piece to try out the properties of evelon.  I love the feel of it: so soft and strong.

Once the leaves were done I felt I wanted to use them for something so made the gum flowers from cotton yarn with felt forming the gum nuts. 

The piece is mounted on a small canvas which is covered in gold foil and hessian (stapled to the back).

The leaves and flowers are larger than life size but look realistic.

Many thanks, Dianne, for sharing this with us; it's wonderful to see how differently we all use these fabrics.  I'm sure if you have any questions for Dianne, she'd be happy to share more about this pretty piece.

How did you start off using Evolon?  Please do share some pictures, and tell us a bit about it... the same with other spunbond fabrics.  Email me here; thanks!