Foiled Velvet Bag

Another Angie Hughes project I recently completed was a foiled velvet bag. Click here for her machine embroidery gallery which includes examples of her bags. Luckily for me, Angie Hughes published information about foiling as a chapter called Exploring Velvet : a Mixed Media Piece in this lovely book (that's her work in the top lefthand corner)This book is fabulous, bringing together lots of great techniques to create Art Quilts. It contains many of the wonderful contributors to Quilting Arts Magazine - I have a subscription to this magazine and look forward to its bi-monthly arrival in my letter box.
Next step for the bag was being lucky enough to discover the basic bag design in this book : Don't be put off by the sheep on the back cover! This book has some really lovely ideas and useful techniques for making art quilts, using lutradur, and creating lovely velvet bags :-) Then we had a Play day...I started by cutting a piece of black velvet.The top of this piece is vliesofix painted with purple lumiere paint, and then ironed to the velvet when dry.I applied fusible web to the back of some easter egg foil, and then cut the swirls out and ironed them over the top of the vliesofix section. For the green section, I ironed fusible web directly to the velvet, and then ironed some Jones Tones foil paper (I just found mine at Spotlight) through sequin waste onto it. The piece below has had more foil adhered through sequin waste, and then the squares and triangles are chocolate foils attached using the same method as the swirls above.I then placed a chiffon scarf over this entire piece, and stitched around and over the different design elements with metallic thread. I cut the scarf away where I wanted to see more of the foil effect, but left it to show the stitching on top of the foil shapes. I added beads, then cut the bag shape and sewed it together adding a lining. The 'handle' is made by zigzagging together a variety of threads.The bottom is finished with a painted silk cocoon case, stitched and beaded, and hand-dyed silk threads hang from it. This is the completed bag. It was a fun project.