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!

 

Try It Out Thursday : Making Embellishments

This is a quick and easy follow up to Tuesday's post.  I said I wanted to do something with the third flower I had cut out; so I made a freestanding flower with a little bit of glitz.  I took some angelina fibres and ironed them together to make 'cloth', and put that on top of a piece of heavyweight Lutradur.  I didn't have any XL to hand, so used Lutradur 100, it was fine.  I then put the last of the flowers on top of the angelina, making a three layered sandwich.  Then, covering it with greaseproof paper, I ironed all three layers together.  The layer of fusible already on the flower was enough to hold all three layers together, as the angelina is very fine.  If you wish, you could add stitch round the edges as we did with the bag.  I'm intending to punch a hole through one of the petals, to hang it on a piece of ribbon, which I will tie round the handles of the bag.  Try it out with a bit of scrap; you can make embellishments for mobile phones, key fobs, anything you like, using this incredibly simple technique.

Have fun!

Try It Out Tuesday : Embellishing A Bag.

If you remember, I made some flower patterned cloth on Thursday, and said I would use it in a project this week.  My original intention was to use the flowers to embellish a tshirt, but I came across this bag in my stash, and decided to embellish it instead, as it was a good colour for the embellishments. 

I started by putting fusible on the flowers I wanted to use, and cutting three out.  I put one aside for later, in true Blue Peter fashion (!), and fused one on each side of the bag. 

I then put some firm interfacing on the back of each flower, a square big enough to support it, and stitched into the sandwich.  Though this interfacing was sold as fusible, it turned out not to be, so I simply held it into the right place, and anchored it with the machine foot.  You might like to pin it, but don't fuse; the next stage, after stitching, is to cut the excess away.  You could also use Stitch and Tear, if you prefer it.  Or, if you have neither, try one of the heavier weights of Lutradur (not XL; it's too heavy).  It will only use a very small scrap.

I stitched in my own style, which is not regular at all... I prefer it that way, because I think it defines the piece well.  You could, of course, use a decorative hand or machine stitch instead, if you wish, but I chose straight stitch so that you could still see the chunky drawn edges of the flowers.  Remember that florists wrapping, like Lutradur, doesn't fray, so there is no real need for stitch other than as support for the fusible, and to add a little visual interest and contrast. At this point, just trim the excess interfacing away (told you not to fuse!).

I then added some stitch in the same contrasting thread at the top of the bag, to pull it all together.

Hmm.  Not bad...but not finished, either.  I would have been happier with bigger flowers, or more flowers, but I have a Plan...  which you'll see on Thursday.  This method works just as well on anything textile... try it out!

Photo Friday

I would love to feature other artists' work here on a regular basis... if you have a piece you would like to share, please email me here

This piece is slightly bigger than postcard size.  I had made it while demonstrating at a show somewhere, and wanted to echo the little squares that feature in the surface design, which was created using Brusho inks on the base, with stamping using fabric paint.  So, I took larger, dyed wool felt squares, and, using an embellisher machine, added them to the lutradur (lutradur 100, I think).  Lutradur is not any good for embellishing onto things, but it is a great base for felting.  I finished it off with a whisp of white wool.  I'm still wondering about adding some metal foil, or some tiny beads...what do you think?

Try It Out Tuesday : Changing Direction

Remember this?  Well...I'm still not happy.  I have had it kicking about the dining room, right in front of the computer, just looking at it.  I did some more thinking, and playing around, and finally took all those embellishments off the piece, and added one single thing.  It is a suede flower, in beige and a very pale turquoise/green colour.  Eau de nil, but a bit stronger.  It was just the right size to put in the circle, there... and immediately, the piece changed.  It took some of the detail out of the stitching, made a very clear focal point, and seemed to pull the whole piece together...or at least to begin to do that. 

So, I decided to take a similar colour and stitch into the top.  I did this to attempt to decrease the strength of the stitching, which gives the piece its structure.  Putting the flower in there makes it look like a vaguely retro 60's motif...which I rather like.  See what you think.  In the end, I used a variegated beige /mushroom/brown thread which really shouldn't go well, but seems to.

Am I happy now?  No, not really.  I don't think the stitching on the top  layer is strong enough in colour to defuse that strong, dark stitching behind.   I think more stitch is called for; what do you think?  Hand or machine?  More embellishment?  Strong Drink...?  Another layer of cloth?  Please do leave a comment, I'd be interested to see what you think.  We might even get a conversation going!

No matter how badly you feel about a piece, you can normally retrieve it using layer.  One way or another, by either adding colour and/or pattern, or reducing it by, say, burning away, you can change the focus and feel of a piece.  Try it... you know you want to.

Try It Out Thursday : After The Spray...

Remember Monday's post?  Well, having made all that sprayed fabric, I wanted to find something to do with it.  So, when in doubt...yes, you know it.... make a postcard.  I've been making a lot of felt recently, and when I spotted a handful of dyed Wensleydale wool tops that sat beautifully on the sprayed Zeelon, I thought it would be useful to do something with them.  What better than a bit of hand felting?  I've used Lutradur for felting before, but never Zeelon.  So...I positioned the Zeelon carefully on a piece of Lutradur XL that had been cut to postcard size.  I wanted to avoid the scarlet dots which I disliked when I sprayed the original piece, as well as the watermark I created when I tested it for colour fastness. 

Having established I could do that, and which way up I wanted to work, I started trying out the fibres on the cloth.  The first photo, below, shows a wisp of wool tops on the fabric.

 Not a good look; it doesn't show either fabric or fibres to good effect.  So... I moved to this...

...yup, that looks better... and finally to this...

...notice, by the way, that the design has changed a little, has moved across to the right of where I originally started, for no reason other than I like it better.

Why did I use a single needle, and felt by hand?  Because I wasn't using much fibre, and didn't want the holes to appear on the cloth, as they  might have done if I had used a machine, even if I did take out some of the needles.  As it was, I still have holes in one or two places where they shouldn't be... but that's okay.  
My original intention was to felt the fibres straight through the Zeelon and into the Lutradur.  Nope.  I was surprised at how much work it took to get the fibres through the Zeelon, though I suspect that had I used the machine, it would have been much quicker.  I'll fuse the piece together instead.  For obvious reasons, you really don't want to try felting through fused fabrics...

So...what next?  I have a plan, but what would you do?

What Am I Going To Do : Part Four

We left this piece with a bit of foil on it, and nothing much else different.  This, however, is where it starts to get interesting, at least as far as embellishing is concerned.  First, though, I have to consider the piece as a whole.  I am still concerned about the way that the stitching stands out as in some way being separate from the rest of the piece, as you can see below.

So... remember yesterday's Zeelon?  I put that on top of the piece, and got this result:

I really like the way that the Zeelon pulls the whole thing together... but I still want to embellish, and think that adding stitch and embellishment underneath the Zeelon is the way to go. The reason for that would be that I think that if I embellish and stitch over the Zeelon, I will cause the same problem I'm trying to solve.  So, I auditioned some beads and other embellishments...

I like the small beads, but the larger hoops are too dark, and the buttons somehow don't look right.  Even though the smaller of the two beads has the same pink in it as the background (and metallic, to boot...), the black makes it stand out too much.  The thread is good, too, so all I need to do now is have a look at the embellishments underneath the Zeelon, just to make sure that I'm making the right judgement...

...and I think I am.  All I have to do now, is decide where to put the different elements which I have selected, and Just Do It!  I'm going to end this particular series of posts here, as I think that it may take me a while to do all that hand beading.  I did think about the hot glue gun, but somehow feel that it is important to add the beads by hand.  If they had been seed beads, I must admit that I would probably have used hot glue to attach them.  These are larger beads, though, and I may find that I don't want to mass them in a particular area, for which glue would be ideal, but rather spread them amongst the stitch. 

I hope you have enjoyed this particular trip around my design process.  If there is something you would like me to look at on Tuesdays and Thursdays, just add a comment.  Otherwise, I'll just tell you about what I happen to be doing at the time!  And of course, I will record each part of the embellishment process, and eventually produce a Part Five post, to let you see how I get to the finished article.