I've been inspired by The topic creepy crawlie s and have found a few artists to inspire me, Chrispher Marley who makes fab arranged jewel like art with bugs, and Mr Finch on Etsy who creates fabulous finely stitched moths. I've also found E A Seguy, who created prints, bug among the topics back in the 1930s. So this inspired me to stitch..
Mr Finch
New book excitement!
I've been after this for ages. I teach art textiles at GCSE (age 16 in the uk) and this book gives examples of everything that's going on right now in fashion! My students have started a project entitled 'Waterworld', so we've been looking at tropical fish colours, making jellyfish ruffles, and free motion embroidery fish scales.
So here are some more samples... I'm just playing at this stage. One of the main things I couldn't work out was how to do it without getting blocky brown scorching. But the final tree branch example which I did using a stencil I think I turned the heat down on the iron and bingo! No scorching!
Today I had a bit of play with velvet and fibre etch or Devore paste. I've had this stuff for a while, a couple of years in fact but have never got round to having a proper muck about with it. So I went for it on fabrics from Dionne Swift who makes beautiful inspiring Devore textiles, and from George Weil.
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| Apply the fibre etch devo paste on the verse of the velvet, and open a window, apparently it's a bit toxic... |
I dipped the sample into dyes and put a bit of red silk paint in a few of the circles first. The colours are really vibrant on the velvet.
Heat Transfer experiments!
Yesterday I spent hours playing around with heat transfer paints. These paints are just magic and produce amazing unexpected results!
I painted up some sheets of photocopy paper, let them dry and the chopped them up or tore strips and used them with leaves to create these. You have to use synthetic fabric really for vivid colours, on cotton they work a bit but are much more muted.
Flipping the leaves over means you get the colour on the back of the leaf...
I'm going to hand stitch into these with a shiny thread I think. I tried machine stitch but it overpowers them a bit I think. They need just delicate treatment. Then I'll mount them on canvas.
My biggest breakthrough though was using them on leather. I had some very delicate pale grey offcuts which take the colour beautifully, though the results are more muted. These paints are meant for synthetic. But I love how the leather pieces turned out, and I much prefer the shapes. I don't really do regular...
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