Playing with Paper and Fabric

 This month over at the "...Fire" blog we are playing with glue and paper and fabric (click here for Rosalita's post).

I really like this technique.  A while ago, my daughter and I had a blast making paper/fabric valentines and Christmas stars (here).

So I took some of my precious Godiva tissue (DS#1 likes to give me truffles for gifts and they always wrap up even a purchase of 4 truffles with the gold bag and this wonderful paper that I've been saving for a special project).

It was kind of boring with just the Godiva tissue, so I added a couple of paper towels that I had used for cleaning up a previous project.  Then it looked a bit like the ground in late fall after a hard rainstorm (except for the color), so I sprinkled over a few maple pods for resist

and sprayed the whole thing with walnut antiquing spray.  Then I let it dry in the sun.

So now I have this canvas for stitching.  I'm thinking of layering it with batting, then adding some paint.  And maybe burning the edges for an unusual finish...

Happy New Year!

We're celebrating today with watching football, eating Hoppin' John, working on my BJP project, and making cards for my daughter to hand out on Valentine's day.

I love watercolor pencils and crayons, so I thought-- what if I used them on fabric before I layered it with glue and tissue to make paper-cloth? The glue would simultaneously wet the colors and make them run together and also seal the color on the cloth. Hmmm...
Here is cotton that was ironed to freezer paper, then marked up using water color crayons and pencils.
Next, I used my Derwent Inktense pencils to write LOVE all over the cloth. Then I added scraps of different colors of tissue paper and glued the whole mess down with diluted fabric glue.
After the glue was dry, I dry-brushed the whole thing with Setacolor Shimmer paint and set it with a hot iron.

Here are the Valentines. We cut out paper-cloth hearts, punched holes in them and tied them with fuzzy yarn.

Paper-Cloth and 3D Stars

My daughter and I decided to make "paper-cloth" a la Kelli Perkins (who blogs here). I belong to an online group that is doing a book study with Stitch Alchemy and this was our first attempt.We used diluted fabric glue to combine tissue paper with cotton fabric. Then we dripped and drizzled alcohol inks and also mixed some with the diluted glue to brush over the surface of the paper fabric.
My daughter was happy with hers just like this.

But mine needed more. So I used a snowflake stencil to add some blue Lumiere paint -- you can see where I glopped it on in the center -- this was not intentional, I misjudged the amount of paint I had on the foam brush.

After the snowflake globs dried, I thought it still needed something, so I brushed a light coat of diluted golden yellow Setacolor transparent paint over the whole thing. Then we made 3D stars from the paper-cloth.

My hibiscus plant is blooming, so I just couldn't resist using it for a prop to hang the finished stars.