The lady with the tambourine

Now I finished the piece with the embellisher. It showed the possibilities I was waiting for as I bought it. It is made for me and my technique. It would have spared me much work with my earlier pieces...

I did some hand and machine stitching on the piece and embellished it with beads. It is so nice to sew on this material. I was looking for this feeling as I began to do transparent pieces because I didn't like the difficulty of quilting through all the fabric layers. I also wanted the pieces to look light when on the wall because I think quilts are made for covering and not for hanging.

In my past work I had to use bonding material and this made the pieces thicker and it wasn't so good for stitching through the glue.

I got it!

After having to wait 20 days for the embellisher to come I got it yesterday!

Today I tried some possibilities. I did the base of a piece I want to stitch into and I made a country picture for a bag.

It is terrible to see how many techniques are possible... At the moment I want to play with everything and don't get attached to any special technique.

Because of the heating of the studio I can't work as much as I want on all my things and I think it will be 2008 till I can really begin with the workshops... My mother comes to visit me 2 months in the summer and I want to work more on my things before I give the classes, I have a real need of working with fabric now...

I'm getting there...

I'm struggling with a way of combining my two favorite ways of working: drawing and sewing. The problem I have when I want to begin with a textile work is that all my imagination is full of figures. There are not as many colours or textures in the first place, just funny little beings trying to catch my attention... then comes the texture, the making of a fiber background for the story... It's always a story.

I found this piece of work in my stash and I think I'm going to give this technique a try in my next pieces.

what i'm working on...

Yesterday i visited my daughter and looked at some magazines. i found a picture i liked, it was a kind of fabergé egg... anyway, i thought how to translate it into fabric...
i decided to take a fine white fabric and to stamp on it.
After that i put some fabric pieces with postcards patterns -i had burned with the heating tool all around to cut them- and some dyed cheesecloth. i covered everything with painted vliesofix -in white- and nylon chiffon in pale violet.
i ironed all together.
the medaillon is made of painted vliesofix onto white fabric with one of my drawings -altered with photoshop- sewn to it. i put some lace on it and now i'm trying to decide what stitching I'm going to use on the piece... i'll continue tomorrow.

Fabric/ Paper or Paper/Fabric

My friend Hedi Edinger visited me this week and we made our own vernissage of the studio. We worked for the first time as a "group" in it and tried some new possibilities with fabric and paper.

I always liked to do my "fabric" on which I could work. These last years I tried many combinations of material as a base for further embroidery and embellishment. I wanted to do the pieces more "light" and transparent. Because of that I used mostly cheesecloth, felted of layed on with other materials (all I could find from wool to nappy liners). I also used hemp and loose fibers in between the layers.

Now I read in "Mixed Media Explorations" from Beryl Taylor that she used paper between fabric and tissue paper and bonded everything with PVA glue, so that I decided to give it a try with Hedi.

We took light cotton fabric and layered the other media as described and then painted it with Golden Fluid. This was my first try with Golden Fluid and I must confess that I tried to economize with this paint because of the price of it in Europe an thinking it is just a try, so that I ended with a mudded color I actually didn't want to have but was too avaricious to dump it right away! I told myself everything can be turned to a nice piece if you know how and continue working on it, so that at the end I decided to use the back of the Fabric Paper instead of the front and enjoyed the wonderful "print" that occurred on that side and that looks like a small rose flowers print. The colors are more subdued in the original and I think the photograph doesn't give it much credit...

All worked out fine at the end. The piece is rather stiff, not like my transparent cheesecloth ones, but if offers another range of possibilities. I didn't like hand stitching on it (I mean the feeling of it rather than the outcome that can be great!)

All in all a great technique that I want to explore further, adding or taking something till I feel I can incorporate it to my work.

It's fun, try it!!

New UFO - interesting material

This is the new/old finished UFO. I was thinking about all the codes we have to memorize nowadays, we are nothing but prisoners of the technology...

I also wanted to share a new discovery. I found a non-woven at the hardware store that is used as drainage insulation or something like that. It is grey and very cheap. It can be used as Kunin felt (not so precious but good to use!), you can paint and sew over it and you can heat it and melt it like most nonwovens. I also used it in the triangles on my last UFO (Teatime). It gives a very good stability to the pieces and you can underlay them with it. A real bargain!

You can see it as underground of this new UFO.

New Year 2007

I took this pictures without noticing that there are no people on them! we were only 3 (my husband and my best friend) because the children were all somewhere else!

My husband lighted all the candles he found! it was really romantic!