Tulips and Rosie - the Beginning

Usually the bunnies nibble the stems of the tulips.   Then the buds fall off and I never get to see them bloom.  For some reason, this year the *%$&! rabbits left my flowers alone and I took a series of photos with Rosie posing with the posies.

I need a piece with a botanical theme and I really like this shot.

I wanted to work big this time, so I cropped it, converted it, made a line drawing, and printed out this pattern on my computer.  I laid it out on the rug and taped the sheets together.

note to self: next time vacuum up the dog hair before laying out the papers!

I traced it onto freezer paper and began cutting out the fabrics.  I'm using raw-edge appliqué for this with MistyFuse for my glue.

Getting the eyes done really makes a difference.

I made the tulips using Tsukineko inks on plain white fabric.  Then I fused them.  The pieces were just too small to fiddle with and I plan to cover them with thread anyway.

I'm linking up with Nina Marie at Off the Wall Fridays today.

Discharge and Design Wall

I've been playing around with discharging fabric with bleach and deColourant.  Above are three pieces I pleated with my smocking pleater, then I dipped the top two in bleach and used deColourant on the third.  I really like that the third piece discharged to white.  

These next two are from a failed attempt at "snow-discharging."  I thought they looked pretty blah, so I mixed up some flour and water, spread it over, let it dry, then sprayed them with bleach.  Much better.

And this is my design wall.  That's Poseidon with his trident.  I ran out of MistyFuse and my LQS doesn't carry it anymore, so I had to stop for now.  Hopefully, I can work on this some more next weekend.  I'm having a little trouble deciding on the fabric to use for his seahorses anyway.

To check out other design walls, go to Judy's blog.  

Curses! Foiled Again!

 Last week on my design wall, there was this piece of fabric that I had to do something to.  But I wasn't sure exactly what to do to it.

I finally decided to do some more foiling.  Yep -- foiled again!  But no cursing.

 Because it had already been foiled with glue, I used black Mistyfuse shapes and scattered them around the piece.  I really like the black Mistyfuse on the black background.  I had to be careful not to hit the previous foiling with my iron and I also made sure I worked around it with the fusible web.

I pressed the pieces of Mistyfuse, then added the foil on top.  I really like the way the foil isn't a solid blob -- it has the pattern from the fusible because the foil sticks only to the glue in the fusible web.



This is the final finished piece.  It was dyed, then waxed and over-dyed, then foiled twice.

 This is my final art cloth.  It started out as a snow-dyed madala, looking something like the piece on the left.  I know I took a photo of it before I sent it on its journey, but I can't find it.  Fortunately, I had two that were almost alike.

Beth from Maine was the first to get it.  She used something called "fugitive media."   Basically, it means that she used things that normally aren't permanent on fabric -- chalk pastels and water soluble oil pastels in this case -- then she painted them with base extender and heat set.  There is a much more eloquent explanation of fugitive media here at "...And Then We Set it on Fire."

Then Laura painted it with red Setacolor paint and sun-printed it using round shapes, foam cut outs and gravel from her driveway as resists.

Here is a detail showing the paint and the final foiling that Jenny did.  She followed the starburst design that happened during the original dyeing.  It's a pretty amazing piece.  I'm enjoying having it up on my design wall.

For other design walls, click here to go to Judy's blog.