This is currently a work in progress. Again, it is part of the series of bonded and constructed fabrics I have been working on for my City and Guilds Diploma. I started with creating some bonded tissue papers - a technique first played with whilst studying for my City and Guilds Certificate. I then applied some painted bondaweb to this layer I now need to decide on what stitching to add and the possibility of adding fabric scraps.
Sheers, foil and sweet wrappers on soluble fabric with free machine embroidery. This involved chocolate eating, this was a good and bad thing: lots of fudge (yum), strawberry creams (bleh!) and calories (boo hiss).
Fabric rags and specialist yarn coiled and stitched on to soluble fabric with assorted embroidery stitches. This was a bit of an experiment. I was itching to use some of the yarns that I bought when I visited Colinette's factory shop in May. I combined a few bits with some of my fabric scraps in this sample. I decided to coil the yarn and then stitch it down by machine. I then realised that I needed to apply a lot more stitching - machine and hand - otherwise I would end up with an unravelled yarn and rag mess when it comes to dissolving the soluble backing.
A fabric made of woven ribbon, stitched onto soluble fabric, embellished with an assortment of embroidery stitches. Like the previous fabric the water soluble element still has to be washed away.
Normally I wouldn't get excited about aprons although there are plenty of people who do. But I spotted this as I was checking out a newly (well to me anyway) discovered blog. Is it the Domestic Goddess reluctantly coming out? Until now I have been perfectly happy with my serviceable and functional ones (and in the case of the stripy one made by my Mum - funky) which get routinely rotated through the wash.
Hopefully, a pattern will soon become available and I will be able to satisfy my apron lust and start whipping together the cucumber sandwiches and fairy cakes.
A little something I put together for my sister K who had her birthday yesterday. Again, its a project from Kokoro-No-Te by Kumiko Sudo. I packed it with some lavender harvested from my garden and sent it to her with a card.
I was tempted to stitch some of this by machine, but instead opted to entirely hand stitch it whilst sitting in front of the TV. The beads for the handle were salvaged from an old necklace which I found in my stash. The pansy petals were stitched from hand dyed fabric scraps, the main body from remnants of fabric used to line my iron case.
The method for the above sample piece was as follows:
Fabric scraps bonded to light iron on interfacing - I ensured the entire surface of the vilene was covered.
Free machine embroidery. This got quite gnarled and bumpy - a good iron sorted it out. I would reconsider doing this again but with a much thicker vilene. Alternatively I would go for my usual combination of calico and Bondaweb.
A good iron then sorted it all out, although I was still not happy with the look of the work. Luckily the next step was to: cut it up.
Then it was a matter of hand stitching it together using insertion stitches. I finished the outer edges with variations on blanket and buttonhole stitches.
Project Spectrum is now over (until 2007 - hopefully Lolly will set this off again in January). This is my final postcard - which I made as part of clean sweeps month. I currently have a blank space on my cubicle wall for this little postcard between my orange/yellow and natural colours postcard. Unfortunately I had no swap partner - so will be putting both 1 copy in my album with the other wonderful cards I got from my global swap partners.
I thought I had based the postcard on a proverb but I think its actually a song lyric : "Love makes the world go around". This is based on the principal that love is the force behind human life. In medieval theology, it was held that love literally set the universe in motion.
The majority of the birthdays are for very small children so a bumper buying session at a toy shop is on the cards. As I am such a geek I have calculated that the average age reached is 11, the average was elevated by the aforementioned L and K, my sister.
This little keepsake cache is stitched together from a project from a book by Kumiko Sudo "Kokoro-No-Te" - Handmade from the heart in English. I have made a few projects from this book mainly useful things like pincushions and needlecases for myself and buddies I know who actually sew (apart from my C&G class - these people are few and far between). I decided to use some of my guilty quilt fabric purchases for this project as well as some pink viscose wool felt I had left over from previous projects and some silk/cotton mix for the buds. The little beads were subsituted for the recommended larger beads because I couldn't face trying to find my bead stash in the loft.
The projects in the book are exquisite and generally are straight forward - although like any project its worth reading it through beforehand. They are quite time consuming because they all almost exclusively rely on hand sewing. It would be difficult to construct the projects on the machine without signficant changes in the nature of the finished result. By the time you had done that you may as well have made it by hand.
