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.
