Velvet Night Garden

Finished my velvet piece in time to show at our Tote & Gloat show tomorrow. Click on any photo to see more details.
Have a look at how this project started here, then I added foils here, so began the next stage with this

Since last time I have just added some black misty fuse with a few wee stars and bronze glitter to add to the night sky feel.

Next step was to audition different colours of organza overlays. Amazing what different looks they give to the piece.

Bronze

Silver

Cerise Pink

Black

Lime Green

Comparing silver and black

I think Angie often uses black, but my choice was the silver in the end - I like the sparkle...and so to stitch.

I stitched with metallic threads mainly in the bobbin. If you outline quilt in black first from the top, you can easily see where you are going from the back. Of course there is still an element of surprise when you turn it over.

Last step was to trim the organza away from the background. This the finished piece before being framed.

Hope you have a fun weekend.

Workshop Thursday

Yesterday I pulled out this velvet and bleach base which I started last year a la Angie Hughes (go here to see how I did it)

I gathered foils - Jones Tones and chocolate foil wrappers - as well as some lovely fine glitter

Got myself reinspired by looking at Angie's galleries of some of her gorgeous velvet garden pieces and then did some fusing and foiling on my piece.

More to follow soon I hope.

Velvet & Bleach

I love Angie Hughes' work - you may remember that so far I have made a bookwrap and a foiled velvet bag using her techniques. Yesterday 3 of us had a play day and tried out something new following instructions on this dvd (lovely selection of DVDs available from Minerva).

Have a peek at the contents on the YouTube preview
As with much of Angie's work, there are a variety of layers built up. Because of the limited time we had available, Katherine kindly did steps 1 and 2 for us a day before. This is my piece sprayed with silk paints

followed by quink ink

This technique works well with wooden printing blocks - we pooled our resources and had a lovely lot to use.

Then we went about the business of applying bleach gel to the printing blocks

and pressing them onto the coloured velvet.

You can see in the above photo that found objects like lego and bobbled coffee cup holders joined the wooden blocks for mark making with bleach :-)
This process discharged the ink, and revealed the paints below.

As we built up the layers we created pieces that look like gardens at night.

Once we thought we'd used enough of the bleach, we then overstamped areas using a variety of metallic paints. Here are the 3 pieces at the end of our playday.

Mine

Katherine's

Rhonda's

Next step is maybe some foils and definitely lots of stitch.
Check out this post by Angie of work by students that were lucky enough to have her take a class for them in person.
And see more of Angie's beautiful work at her website or her blog
Have a lovely weekend - thanks for stopping by. 

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.

Bookwrap

Do you know the work of Angie Hughes? She is a wonderful textile artist who has inspired a couple of projects from me lately. The first, a velvet bag, I will share with you another day. Today I am going to show you a book that I completed yesterday.This started life as another play day, with an article from Quilting Arts mag, October/November 2007, as our starting point. Click on the cover for info about that issue.This issue featured an article by Angie Hughes on making textural book wraps. We started by roughly weaving fabrics.I decided to put a chiffon scarf over mine to keep it together, and then free-motion stitched it over felt to create the cover. This is the inside felt:and the outside: Mine turned out less textured than Angie's examples, which is okay this time, but I would like to try again and make it a bit more unfinished looking. Also the proportions weren't right for a wrap, so I turned it into a book cover. I gathered papers and painted some watercolour pages, and edged some too. These are some of the internal pages. I sitched the pages into the cover, and attached ties of different fabrics, finished with paua buttons. Not sure what I will put on the pages yet, but it is lovely to hold this completed book.
If you liked the look of Angie Hughes, check out her book too.
Lots more wonderful things to try.