Playing with paper serviettes

Our second meeting in April was right after Orange Fibre Forum. Usually members come back full of exciting news and thoroughly inspired for another year. This year was a little different because for various reasons, most members couldn't come, and there were just three of us. Our plan was to play around with paper napkins (serviettes) We all have a decent collection of paper serviettes for Artistic Purposes, so we brought along our treasures to swap. The first May meeting was also devoted to paper serviettes, for those who missed out initially.

Carol brought along this postcard for us to admire. It was made in Dale Rollerson's Ratty Tatty online workshop a while back. Carol really recommends Dale's online workshops as great value and full of interesting ideas to explore. The postcard uses layers of the same serviette, a base layer, fused to felt, and then subsequent layers, stitched and frayed. It adds a real depth to the work.
Then we started work. Carol had brought along some mat board offcuts, cut into a variety of sizes, including ATCs and postcards. We had PVC (white) glue and card or old credit cards as spreaders. Nola brought along an old phone directory as a base to glue on. It's an ideal base because, after each time, you can turn the page and prevent glue transferring to places where you don't want it!

When you're working with paper serviettes, it's important to remember that they are usually two- or three-ply. That means there's a layer of printed paper and at least one more layer of plain paper. You can use the serviettes as they are, but you need to ensure that the medium you're using to adhere the paper goes through all layers. Using all the layers results in a more opaque image; using just the top layer allows you to play with layers a little, since the layers below may show through. Sometimes the second layer has a shadow image of the main image, which can be useful. As you can see with Carol's postcard, you can use images from the same serviette, or multiple serviettes with the same image, several times, on top of one another, to achieve shadow or texture.

Carol made this cute cat postcard:

She used a modelling medium under the cats, to make them stand out from the background. The medium takes a long time to dry but the effects are interesting. Nola used the same medium on two similar postcards. You can manipulate the wet medium once the image is added:

This one has quite a lot of texture, especially in the sky for wind effects, but it needed some extra details. She added more layers of the same serviette, to deepen the colours, and some Treasure Gold to tone back the brightness of the colours and pick up the highlights. The wind effects are much more pronounced, aren't they? She also added stronger outlines in some places, to make it look less flat.

For Nola's second one using the modelling medium, she laid the medium down in a grid pattern, before adding the serviette. The grid pattern isn't very marked, although it's still present. It was outlined and rubbed with Treasure Gold, as well.

Helen was more interested in adhering the serviettes to fabric. She made several  fabric pieces, on calico:

She also adhered one to card:

I'm sure we'll see these again, in works to come!

Carol used the same serviette as Helen to make an ATC background.

She later added a Chinese teapot and cups from a second serviette, but hasn't photographed it yet. It was a good illustration of how these serviettes can be used as the basis for other things. She used the same serviette as the basis of a bookmark:

And here are some tiny cards she made, using the scraps of serviettes as a colour palette. Again these make an interesting background to other media. I hope we'll see what she does with these!

Nola used two layers of a simple serviette to make an elegant book cover.

But, once it dried, she wasn't very happy with it, as it just seemed dull and dirty. So she added some

colour with Carol's tiny set of kids' watercolours, bought in a cheap store. Very handy for taking on the road!

It probably will have more exciting things done to it, but it's certainly a good basis for a book cover.

Nola also liked this image of a Fifties housewife and added it to a postcard base.

The shadow behind her looked ominous, so she added borders of tissue paper to emphasise the sense of foreboding.

I'm not sure it's a postcard for swapping, though!
Speaking of swap postcards, Helen brought along this one for swapping:

She looks gloriously ditsy, doesn't she? The stitching really works to set the mood.

Helen also brought along a book she made, from pseudo-vellum. The paper was coated with Shellac, giving it a gorgeous leathery feel and look.

Meanwhile, our absent members returned, with treasures from their week at Orange Fibre Forum. Maz took a workshop with Barbara Schey, specialising in Dorset buttons. During the week, she made this very clever box.

As you can see, the decoration includes the Dorset buttons, but the box is very cleverly constructed as well. Maz also made a brooch from a Dorset button.

 She has several more underway.

Dorset buttons were made in a cottage industry in East Dorset from the late 1600s. "Cottage industry" is a bit misleading, since it suggests a small scale industry. But as many as a thousand people were involved in their manufacture in the heyday of the industry, when the buttons were fashionable and sold world-wide. Many of the button makers were children but, like the spinning and weaving cottage industries, whole families were employed making buttons. The buttons are made by stitching over rings, these days made of metal but probably bone, horn or other natural materials were originally used. You can see some brilliant examples of different styles of button at the British Button Society.

Beverley was also at Forum, and her week was spent with Isobel Hall, making amazing complex layered media. A typical piece might have layers of Crash with fusible web, coated with Gesso, decorated with soft pastels, layered with Mod Podge, painted with alcohol inks, sealed and then coated with encaustic wax. Or tea stained media with acrylic wax, embroidery, and beading. Amazing! You can see her latest books, with Maggie Grey, Mixed Media: new studio techniques, here and a brief bio on the same site, here.

Bev made this beautiful book in the class:

She made a complicated layered & textured background, and added hand stitching. It's absolutely gorgeous! She also made this handbag, yet to be finished,

This book cover included cocoon strippings made into a kind of paper, tea staining and acrylic wax.

 She also made this sheet of mixed media work for later use:

So I guess she had a pretty busy week!

First April meeting

Our meetings in April were rather disrupted, first because of Fibre Forum at Orange and then by Easter. But we still managed to find a time to meet, although we were few in number. Our first meeting in April brought the unveiling of our second challenge, Lost Treasures. You'll have seen some of the pieces along the way, but here is what was unveiled on the day.

Helen's Lost Treasure was a treasure box, made for her, years ago, by her granddaughter. She had collected togather all sorts of tiny treasures in a chocolate box and presented them to her grandmother. There are buttons, a pretty marble, beads, all manner of lovely little things. It really is gorgeous! Helen decided to cover the box in "treasure" fabric and present it back to her now-adult granddaughter.

Nola struggled to get her Lost Treasures done in time. She's making a journal cover, but it didn't come together well. This is what she unveiled on the day.

She's hopeful of things to come....

Carol lost her Lost Treasure. However, she made this beautiful crochet shawl. Made from man-made fibres from a pattern, Exquisite, from Heirloom Afghans for Baby. She had hoped to enter it in a local fair but it wasn't finished in time.


Carol also brought along an experiment she'd been working on.  It was a dye silk cap, moulded over an Ikea vase and stiffened using floor polish. She notes that it's important to use a shape which is larger at the top than the base, or it becomes a probloem to remove it from the mould!

Busy busy...second postcard swap

Fibrecircle has been quite busy lately but unfortunately, while that means we've done some fun things, no-one has had time to blog about them! At our second meeting in March, we swapped our monthly postcards. This time, we had several swappers - Carol even made two! This one is Beverley's.

Does it remind you of anything? Yes, it's made from one of the samples she did for her Language of Thread challenge work. For both pieces, she was inspired by a technique she saw in a Quilting Arts magazine, of stamping the same image onto different fabrics and then combining them together. She tried stamping with several different media on various fabrics, to get the best effect. Once the two fabrics were combined together, she embellished the stamped image on the postcard with machine stitching. The images on the final work also had quite strong hand stitching. It's a difficult piece to photograph because both the fabric and thread have a sheen to them. The back looks like a postcard, but it has a beautiful hand-drawn element as well, which wasn't photographed at the time. The edges were straight stitched and then satin-stitched with a slightly longer than usual stitch.

Nola decided to use a piece of fabric she'd previously painted as the background to her postcard. It looked rather spring-like so she decided to embroider a butterfly.

The image was a copyright-free image from a Dover Press sampler. She resized and printed the image onto water soluble paper, and used it as a guide for the main stitching. The background fabric was layered with thin cotton batting before stitching. Once she was happy with the stitching, she washed out the paper and added finer details to the image. Then she painted the stitched card with Setacolor paints. The card was a bit floppy so she lined the backing fabric with fusible Vilene. She folded in all raw edges and hand-stitched a buttonhole stitch around the edges.

Maz hand stitched her card on a machine embellished foundation.  She turned the front edges to the back and covered them with a backing piece. The card was stiffened with fusible Vilene.

Helen's elegant card was made by stitching free-standing shapes, joined with fusible web and edged with satin stitch. These were joined to each other and the card background with some beads. The edges were satin stitched. 

                       

Carol made two postcards to swap.  Both used paper serviettes as the basis but in different ways. The first postcard  had the serviette adhered to the backing and overlaid with a mesh fabric. Motifs from the serviette were adhered over the top.

The second postcard used a serviette with the same motifs. The serviette was adhered to the background and this was cut apart and reshuffled. The pieces were stitched back together using a single machine stitch. The motifs were attached to a backing, so they sat higher than the surface, giving a sense of depth. Both cards were stiffened with card and the edges were stitched with a machine buttonhole stitch.

These were a good advertisement for our next meeting, when we plan to swap serviettes with interesting motifs and have a play day with them.

Carol was busy sorting loose beads and stringing them. However, this is just her "loose beads" box - it seems she has a lot more other beads at home!

Helen brought along her canvas embroidery piece that she's been working on for some time.

It really is a lovely thing. She was talking about making it into a three-sided vessel, if she can work out the technical challenges.

Maz was stitching on her Lost Treasures challenge piece. It's a lost treasure because she began it in a workshop some time back, and found it again recently.

The background fabric has stamped images of carafes like the stitched one.

Tricia was continuing her Tunisian crochet.

It's a gorgeous scarf, with a selection of different yarns in deep jewel tones. She also brought along another scarf she'd made:

It's so light and soft, I think we all wanted to steal it!

Helen brought along this treasure to show us:

Nola was playing with books. She's making a book cover for Lost Treasures, but she also pulled out her Round Robin book pages that we made two years ago. Her theme was Sailing to Byzantium, so she was sketching various Byzantine motifs that might work on her book page.

Next time, we'll have the revealing of Lost Treasures!

Lazy day

What a bunch of slackers! No-one felt like doing very much today. Perhaps it was the weather, which started out muggy and ended up trying unsuccessfully to rain. Hard to feel engaged with textile stuff, or anything other than browsing everyone's magazines and having a gentle nap, really!

Beverley brought along her finished Language of Threads challenge work, which she called Threads and Flowers. She exhibited it in the art quilt section of her local quilt group last weekend and guess what? It won first prize! Here it is, with its winning labels still attached:

Sorry about the diagonal background, the photographer was in a bit of a rush! Her prize was a delicious collection of Gutermann threads, an interesting Australian quilt book and some sixteenths of fabric.

Most of the day, we chatted and read magazines. Nola was thinking about her Language of Threads challenge, but was daunted by tangled skeins that needed winding before they could be used. Carol was sorting cub scout badges to sew onto her thick coat, which she refers to as "the blanket". She began to sew badges but lost interest. Tricia had her sketchbook but couldn't get started, and Beverley had some stitching but about the same level of interest.

Nola moved on to her Lost Treasures challenge, showing the others the fabrics she'd pulled from her stash to go with the "treasure" she found last time. But none was quite right, so  eventually she pulled out her Setacolor paints and painted some quilter's muslin in a couple of shades she thought might work. She finished off the piece of fabric with some roller marks in blue and yellow paints, blended on the sponge roller.

She wanted a slightly green dark blue. The right side is indigo and ultramarine with a little yellow added but it is still a little too blue; the middle has indigo with more yellow added and is more like the colour she imagined. The plan is to use just a small amount as a narrow border.

None of today's photography is great, because the light was so changeable, but it gives an idea of what we were doing. Such as it was!

First postcard swap

Today was the first Fibrecircle postcard swap. Like most of our projects, there's no pressure for anyone to participate, so today only Maz and Nola had finished postcards. We're a very relaxed group! Tricia had one underway, which  may be finished for the next swap, in March.

Here's Maz's finished postcard. She was working on it last week  remember?

Small pieces of patterned  commercial and hand painted fabrics in black, cream and gold were pleated and attached to the black cotton background. They were surrounded by silver stitching, and the whole mounted over card stock. A cream fabric backing, drawn like a blank postcard, was hand stitched to the back.

Here's Nola's postcard:

The base of Nola's postcard is painted fusible web, with an overlay of crystal organza. It's one of her From the Heartland series, which has been running intermittently since 2007. This one is inspired by satellite photographs of the Menindee Lakes system in western New South Wales, although it uses the same basic pebbles-on-sand layout of the earlier postcards. The shapes were free-motion embroidered, and then further textural stitching was added by hand. Lastly, the brilliant lakes were painted inside the stitched shapes. The backing is brown felt, with a filling of Timtex, and the edges were satin stitched over fluffy yarn to give a firm edge and cover all traces of the Timtex.

Tricia's unfinished postcard looks like this:

All the details are hand stitched onto a hand-dyed background. She brought it along today for ideas about how to finish it into a postcard. So we looked through Nola's collection of ATCs and postcards for finishing ideas.

A Dozen Easy Ways to Finish your ATC or Postcard
1. Turn the front edges to the back over the lining material, and glue or hold with thread. Layer over a backing, attached with slip stitching, like Maz's, or with fusible web and stitched down with machine straight stitching or a patterned machine stitch. This also works well with a card stock backing that can be glued in place.
2. Satin stitched edge, like Nola's postcard, or a zigzag stitch. Nola's was satin-stitched over a yarn, which tends to cover the inner layer nicely, without showing glimpses of white around the edges.
3. Bagged - i.e. stitch from and back layers, right sides together, leaving a small gap for turning. Works best with softer fillings like quilt batting.
4. Bound like a quilt, either in strips or a continuous mitred binding, slip stitched on the back. One variation is to stitch the binding to the back, turn it to the front and top stitch it down with a patterned machine stitch.
5. Straight stitch around the edges - this can be simple or complex, but thicker inner layers, like batting or Timtex, tend to show around the edges. Straight stitching a narrow braid on the front side is effective.
6. Use a machine herringbone-style stitch, so that the outer edge of the stitch passes over the edge. Also better with thin or no inner layer and can look striking on a card stock backing.
7. Free motion swirls or loops, with inner layer hidden between extended front and back layers
8. Hand or machine buttonhole stitch around the edges - this also works best with thinner inner layers as batting or Timtex will show.
9. Cut lining slightly smaller and adhere front and back layers with fusible web. Trim with pinking shears and straight stitch inside the pinked edge.
10. Overlock (serge) the edges together, then cover the stitching with braid, rickrack or glued fabric strips.
11. Stitch eyelash or similar yarn on each side, beginning with the back, and using matching thread. The fringes blend, hiding the lining.
12. Layer a fabric between the front and lining, cut 1/2in oversize. Stitch around the edge through all four layers (front, extra fabric, lining and back) with wide zigzag or buttonhole stitch , and then fray the larger piece of fabric back to the stitching line, making a simple fringe.

Possible linings - Shapewell interfacing (a stiff but light woven interfacing), Timtex, quilt batting, cardboard of various weights, Pellon in various weights.

Nola did very little, creatively, today. She looked through her folder of samples for ideas for the next month's postcard and for our Lost Treasures challenge. For the challenge, she found this little piece:

It looks very like Lost Treasure, doesn't it? And for her next postcard, she found this little piece of painted fabric:

Carol was working on baskets woven from craft cardboard. Much of her life these days is spent in working out creative activities for her Scouts and Joeys!

Tricia was stitching today and she brought along two pieces to work on. She began the first one in a class with Jan Irvine-Nealie at Orange Fibre Forum a couple of years ago, based on a photo.

She has rocks to add in the foreground and some trees. It's looking really interesting!

Tricia's other stitching piece is a trial for a larger work she wants to make. Both use her own dyed fabrics, but this one is smaller. She's experimenting on this one with thread colour and different stitches, to get the effect she wants for the larger piece. It's hard to see the stitched area in the photo but it has the feel of something ancient.

Beverley was working on her Language of Threads quilt, which she'd like to exhibit in her quilt group's show soon. She was working on this last week too. It's coming along nicely, isn't it?

Maz was stitching on the next challenge, Lost Treasures. She found this "lost treasure' in her cupboard and was inspired to keep working on it. She painted and stamped the fabric quite a long time ago, and now she's adding stitch.

The printed pattern on the fabric is bottle and carafe shapes like the one she is stitching.

Helen was working on her rug canvas work, like last week.  The rug canvas is quite fine, this time, so it's fairly slow work.

She painted the rug canvas, as she often does, before she started stitching. She also brought along a canvas work vessel, a challenge from another group. By moistening the canvas, she softens the glue that adheres the fibres together, not enough to make them come apart, but enough that, once it has been moulded into shape and dried, it stays in the new shape. Sorry, no photo of that one!

Helen's main show and tell, though, was a collection of works from her embroidery group, Lateral Stitchers. Each year, they have a paper bag challenge. This time, they took a copy (by permission) of an original image by Toni Valentine, which she made in a class on Hundertwasser. They cut it apart and each person took a section to reproduce in whatever way they chose. Here are the sections they made, laid out on top of the original image.

Just stunning work by those girls, and Toni too!

See you in a fortnight.

Back together again!

Today was our first full meeting after the holidays and the unveiling of our first Challenge, The Language of Threads, set by Maz before Christmas. Four members had works to share.
Helen showed us her completed bag, called Threads of India.
 

The embroidery was done on rug canvas, which was stiffened with pelmet vilene and assembled with calico and braid into a bag. The colours were inspired  by a photograph of dye workers in India.

Carol's Language of Threads piece is called Treasure Islands. She hasn't quite finished it yet.

She began with a felt background, and hand couched hand spun and threads and then machine embroidered. Like most shiny things, it's hard to photograph well, but it looks wonderful.

Maz showed her piece, Impressions, which is also not yet finished.

It's made using fabric lamination of newspaper images and text onto synthetic organza, using matte medium  as the adhesive. If you enlarge the photo, you can see the stitching she's adding, which  gives a lovely rich texture.

Beverley's challenge used her own hand-carved blocks. She carved a positive and negative version of the same image, and stamped it onto different fabrics. She pieced a background from two fabrics and is mounting her images on that background. Some images are a single layer, with frayed edges, while others have been lined. She is adding running stitches, French knots and other embroidery in Perle thread.

We had a perennial visitor to our group this time. Janet Bass from Pittsburgh was making her annual visit to Australia and came to join us. Her task today was to crochet a breast shape from strips of plastic bags, for a future installation planned by a fellow artist.

Here she is crocheting away, with Maz hard at work beside her. Maz was working on a small piece that may become a postcard to swap.

Beverley brought along some little embroidered fragments she has been making. She used an adhesive to hold the elements in place while she stitched them, and used Solvy as the stabiliser.

 Helen was working on another rug canvas piece.

It's very soft and pretty in colour - can't wait to see it finished!

Tricia brought some beautiful roving to spin. Helen was happy to help her manage it, though it did look as if she had plans to make away with it. She does have rather more of it than Tricia, doesn't she?

Tricia is keeping a firm grip on the end, though!



Nola was busy with her orphan blocks project. From leftover quilt blocks and units of different sizes, she's making twelve inch blocks for a quilt top.

Here are some of the blocks she's made already. Today, she was converting a 5 1/2in finished Log Cabin block into a 12in block, by adding double borders - 1 1/2in finished borders with corner posts and 1 3/4in finished pieced strip borders, like the ones in the top right hand block.

Our next Challenge was chosen by Carol. She has set us the task of making a work on the theme of Lost Treasures, to be shared at our first April meeting. So many possibilities! Meanwhile, we're busy making postcards to swap for our next meeting in two weeks' time.