Another great Celyn Textiles class

I have really enjoyed myself yesterday evening and all day today, learning how to dye fabric, transfer designs onto fabric panels, use perle thread in the bottom of my sewing machine, and sew organza onto wood.  And one day I may even finish my wall hanging!

The class, taught by Sheila, was called 'Twisted', and this is the sample Sheila brought to show us.  The corduroy fabric used for the base, and the scrim embellished to it were hand dyed using procion dyes.

We soaked our fabrics in a mixture of water, baking soda and ash, wrung them dry, then squirted the fabric with various colours of dye (made from procion dye powder mixed with urea).  The fabrics dried overnight, and then we started working on them.  The image below is the back of my panel, and I drew the design for my panel on the back with an ordinary rollerball pen.  I forgot that the design would come out like a mirror image on the front, I wish I'd remembered to reverse it when I drew it!

We then cut the dyed gauze/scrim into pieces, made holes in it, distorted it and generally made it shabby before using the embellishing machine to adhere it to the corduroy.

Once the scrim was in place, we 'drew' our designs with machine stitching.

The next step will be to fill in all the motifs with machine embroidery, but I had forgotten to take my free motion embroidery foot with me so I had to skip that step!

Sheila had the fantastic idea of using florist 'canes' (balsa wood?) as a 'frame' for leaves and shapes made from organza.  

I had a great time in the class, and hope to finish this panel - I'll post a pic when I do.  Meanwhile, the other class members were generous enough to let me take pictures of their half finished pieces to share here, so you can see the variety of pieces which will spring from this class. Don't forget that you can enlarge an image by clicking on it.

Lovely birdie, beautiful colours....

Fabulous colour contrast...

Autumnal rusty shades and beautifully embroidered flowers....

A fishy business...

Variegated threads....

And fabulous free motion work with gold thread.....

Great class with a great bunch of women - and I'm looking forward to the next class in January!

Alphabetica S

I thought I'd do another fabric alphabetica postcard, so this one (S) is Slashed, Silk, Stitch, Sample.

The front is very simply done, I sewed a layer of blue silk onto some orange silk, sewing from the edge of the piece to the centre in an oblong spiral. I took some sharp scissors and cut the fabric between the stitching, then wrote the words on a small piece of vilene and sewed that on.

For the stitched sample, I just sewed straight lines of embroidery stitches onto the silk, which was layered onto pelmet vilene, and sewed another vilene 'label' on.  Finally I sewed the slashed silk to the stitch sample and posted it to a friend!

Fabric postcard

I have been on a couple of Angie Hughes courses at Ledbury Artspace recently. The first course was all about working with velvet, transfer foils, organza and stitch. I have a half finished piece from that course, but as I have very little experience of free motion embroidery I wanted to get more before I try and finish it off.

So, I thought I'd make a fabric postcard as a practice piece.

I took some red cotton velvet and masked out some rectangles then ironed bondaweb all over it. I covered it with organza and stitched around the rectangles, then used vermicelli stitch to cover the area around the rectangles, using a variegated thread. I hand sewed little flower sequins and beads into the rectangles. Finally, I backed the piece with pelmet vilene and finished the edges with a zig zag stitch. Frankly, I was surprised at how well it went, because I still don't feel competent with machine embroidery!