More Fiber Collage Adventures

The Fabric Embellishment experiments continue! These projects all are in quite an extensive book, which I should tell you about. The name is Fabric Embellishing: The Basics and Beyond. (Thanks so much, JoAnn!!!) I'll say! It goes way beyond, in my humble opinion. The authors are Ruth Chandler, Liz Kettle, Heather Thomas, and Lauren Vlcek - all apparently incredibly creative souls. I'm working my way through the book, more or less from page one. I am skipping some of the projects that use materials I don't have or can't get easily, but I'll probably go back and do each of them at some point. Some techniques I have tried in the past but even some of those inspire me to try something new. Today I am transferring some inkjet images printed on transparency sheets onto fabric, actually using neither technique recommended quite as described by my "textbook" and instead using some transfer techniques I use often on paper but not on fabric - water on one piece and acrylic matte medium on another. The photo you see above (Pink Lady's Slipper orchids on the Hays Brook Trail) was transferred to muslin after being printed on a transparency (3M brand - not ideal but okay for this) with water as the transfer medium (sprayed onto the transparency image). It is drying at this moment and will be made into another 7 inch square later with some other materials (maybe some paper) for a collage.

The piece at the right was discharge dyed using a Clorox gel pen. It is a somewhat crude method (which is sometimes exactly what I want)  but I like the way it works. I used an old kitchen spatula for my design - just traced around it with the gel pen tip, then added a few embellishments.  It is free-motion stitched with batting and a backing, and it's not quite finished - stay tuned for the rest. (And don't look too closely!)

  This little piece (my favorite, so far) was made for my "printing on ribbon" lesson. Well, I didn't have any ribbon of an appropriate size on hand, so I made ribbons by cutting apart some fabric, although in this case I left most of the square of fabric in one piece until it was printed. Then I cut it apart and placed it on my background. The basic idea is that you print out the text on a piece of paper and then attach the fabric or ribbon over the text with double-sided tape. (Pretty cool, I think.) Send the whole thing through the printer again (keep the original file and don't change anything!!!) and remove your printed pieces. I used some fabric scraps (donated by Amy D. at our play date in December!), a bird I drew and then printed on fabric ages ago, and a National Geographic photo of a crashed plane on its original paper. Free-motion stitching holds it together. By the way, the text is by Brian Andreas from one of his several books. This book is titled Strange Dreams, and I just love his funky little drawings combined with his poems (?). Each page really is like a strange dream - a little odd, leaving you wondering where it came from but knowing there is some truth from your waking life that you can't quite remember. If you want to see more about Brian's wonderful art and books, this site will be a treat. And be sure to buy something! Brian, if you see this I would be greatly honored to hear from you.