52 Tags : Week 40

Time for my take on Anne Brooke's weekly Tag challenge. Week 40 : Something Yummy. Anne kept it really simple this week and couched some yummy yarns onto hand-dyed felt. For me, Silk is Yummy - the feel of it, the colours, the different products that can be used. I looked through my silk stash and found a serviette trapped in silk coccoon strippings with sprinkles of Angelina fibre, sari silk yarn of various weights and colours, and a piece of hand-dyed Dupion silk. Not pictured is my stash of sari ribbons which you will have seen appear often in my work, including this Tag project. All of these feel delicious to me and make me happy.

This is my Yummy Tag - hearts and beads are also yummy and these are some of my favourite yummy colours

This link will take you to all of my posts about this challenge. You can view Anne's weekly demo on Youtube #52tagshannemade.

Mixed Media Fabric Banner Day Class

I've not been able to finish as many art journal pages lately, and one of the reasons is that I'm teaching 3 classes this month! I shared my "From Past to Present Artfully" collage class HERE. In November last year I spoke to the Feilding Kowhai Quilters group about my quilts and mixed media work, and as a result, I taught my fabric banner class to them on Saturday. This is the sample :

See my original blog post with details and closer photos about this project HERE.
Here I am all packed and ready to go - class notes at the ready and lots of lovely inks and fibres to share and inspire with

It was a great day - all the students came armed with supplies, questions, and open to new ideas. I ended up taking 3 different project samples 

and laid out my supplies

First I demonstrated dying our lovely fabric serviettes with a mix of distress inks, reinkers and sprays

Then they had a go - lots of different colour combos

We tried simple silk paper making with gummy silk cocoons

Mine included colour because I just can't help myself - theirs were lovely with the natural fibres - some will add colour later

You can see a lot of paper serviettes embedded above - I also demonstrated a trick for paper serviette tearing and attaching directly to the background fabric

and was lucky that they shared some of their serviettes with me 

We talked about 'found words', stamping and stenciling, painted fusible, and making lovely cords

We had a play with a heat tool and made lovely crusty tyvek beads

Then they started to put everything they'd learned into practice. Click on any photo to see it larger.  Below is a lovely combination of serviette, found words, stamping, silk paper and beads

Our tables were covered with all the demonstrations and play

And it was fun to see layouts evolving

At the end of the day here's a sample of where they got to - all so lovely and so different ♥

It was a happy day for all of us

Still to come, Star books on Saturday 26th for the Marton Quilt club. 

If it goes as well as the other 2 classes have I'll be a happy woman :-)

Fabric Banner

For my birthday in June, I had the wonderful gift of a play day with some creative girlfriends. We made some easy silk paper with cocoon strippings, oversprayed with colour and with serviettes embedded

and then it was time to settle to a project. I wanted to create a banner, and started with some fabric serviettes that came from my grandmother.

On the day I trimmed them to size

and had a wee play with layout

Love the turquoise colour scheme but I don't want to keep the serviettes the original colour so once home, I dyed some samples

You can see what I used above - method :: swipe the distress ink onto baking paper (you can see the used bit underneath the fabric) then spritz with water - it will make the distress ink bead up. Swipe the fabric over to soak up the colour. Luckily I captured what each was in my calendar journal :-)

So the first 2 samples were just the swiped distress inks method, but the second 2 were oversprayed. I let them sit for a few days while I tried to decide which effect I liked best, and then when I dyed the actual serviettes I used another combination!

Dry them flat - if you hang them, you will get dye running down away from the pegs. Here they are dry and ready for decoration

Experimenting with layout

This was happening in my calendar journal ::

I love using found text from large print books in my work, and wanted to include them in the banner. Had another test using gel medium and tacky glue to see which worked best.

I liked the tacky glue under, and gel medium on top. A couple of the banners needed a little something extra, so out came the gold paint and stencils

The silk paper and serviettes adhered well with mistyfuse

I added a felt back using temporary fabric basting spray before I started stitching.

And here is the banner complete :-)

Click on any photo to see it larger

I took my original piece of silk paper and tore it in half. The left side appears in the first section and the right side in the 5th section of the banner.

Here are the individual sections up close, from left to right

The daisies were punched from cardstock that had been gelli printed some time ago

I enjoyed using a combination of machine, hand stitching and beads for different effects. I used staz-on ink for the fantail above and the butterflies below since I dyed over them, but the other stamp pad of the seed heads I didn't take note of since I won't be washing this piece.

So very happy with how this project turned out. Although it is my own original creation, I must give a nod to the initial inspirations which were a combination of Gentlework's Botanical Bunting, and this project

in Ruth Rae's lovely book