Sunday 6 March 2011

... and a Couple More

The Travelling Books for the Oxford Branch of the Embroiderer’s Guild are now into their third season. This time around my pages are following a theme based on the inchies I made just before Christmas (the first TB in my group actually got some of the inchies). I am exploring altering fabrics and each one began life as a piece of white cotton that I dyed with Brusho.


My second piece very much followed the same process as the inchies, first bonding torn fragments of coloured silver foil to the base fabric. I covered this with a piece of lace curtain and then free machine embroidered all over the surface with a variety of threads. I then did more FME in certain areas to pick out some of the lace pattern.


I am not a pleased with this page as the inchies; it is too pink for my taste and not as textured as the first piece.


The third piece I treated differently. First I applied gold paint paste through a stencil. The stencil is a katagami which is a hand cut paper stencil used for dyeing kimono. I have a couple of 'retired' stencils that are no longer in good enough condition for use on kimono. I was hesitant to use them, not really knowing much about them or how to care for them properly. But I have decided that i would rather use them a few times that let them languish in a draw, never to be used again. The design on them is very intricate and gives a very delicate gold pattern on the fabric.


I did not want to totally obscure the pattern so I did not overlaid it with any other materials this time; instead I have over stitched with a variety of threads using some of the decorative stitches on my machine. To stabilize the fabric during stitching I tacked it onto a piece of creative plastic; that allowed me to stitch right to the edges. I don’t think that the design is very coherent but I think the method has some potential and is worth exploring further.


Happy Stitching

1 comment:

Rachel said...

Developing methods and ideas is always fun, isn't it!