Stitched resist from June's meeting

The last meeting was an opportunity for us to prepare fabrics for dyeing in July. I described some techniques that I had been trying and showed my samples, which can be seen below.

I used two different approaches in producing these samples:

* hand or machine stitching, then drawing the fabric up tightly

* dense machine stitching which did not need to be drawn up

The first sample shows hand stitching, in lines, in a block and to outline shapes. The four lines at the bottom are running stitches through one, two, three and four layers of fabric. I used polyester thread double for the stitching.

I started pulling up the threads with the nested squares on the right and I definitely got better as I progressed, because this part did not come out well but the other areas were better.

Here are the results for the parallel lines at the bottom.

And here are the results for the top portion.

I also had a couple of samples using machine stitching, where I had loosened the top thread so I could draw up the stitches. Both used parallel lines of stitching, like this.

This first sample is a bit patchy, the gap is where the thread broke as I tightened it. (I used the same polyester thread as for the hand stitching.)

For the second sample, I used a thicker (quilting) thread in the bobbin, which meant that I didn't have any breakages.

The second approach was something I'd heard about at a show last year and wanted to try for myself. The idea is that stitching will block the dye from fabric covered by a close zigzag or other dense stitch patterns. I tried two stitches in these three samples, in which I pleated the fabric before stitching through all the layers. The stitches are all close zigzag except for the thinner lines in the middle sample which use a stretch stitch. This was an easy way to get a repeat pattern.

The straight lines came out rather faint, but the others worked better. Here are the results.

Finally, I tried stitching a pattern through a layer of fabric on top of wadding. I don't have a picture of the stitching, but here are the results with the wadding on the left and the fabric on the right.

For more ideas, see the blog 'And then we set it on fire', where October 2014 was devoted to stitch resists.

Dabbling with design - May's meeting

Thanks go to Liz for leading last Sunday's meeting on developing designs. We tried a series of exercises:

1. Combining squares of different sizes

2. Distorting block designs

3. Cutting up magazine photos

Here are a few photos of the results.

Thanks to everyone who came along. I hope you enjoyed the meeting.

Photos from April's meeting

We had a good turnout at our last meeting where we were experimenting with using puff paste with Lutrador. The paste was applied through stencils and Thermofax or printing with bubble wrap etc. Here are a few photos of the results:

Join us on 17 May for a session on design development. More details soon.

Trapunto quilts blog

Here is the link to the blog I mentioned at the meeting on Sunday. It belongs to Geta Grama from Romania. 

Her shadow trapunto quilts are super and can be seen in this post.

http://cadouri-din-inima.blogspot.ro/2000/01/my-shadow-trapunto-quilts.html

Trapunto and Boutis

Ten of us met yesterday to experiment with trapunto and boutis techniques. Here is a picture of what we were doing.

And here are a few close ups of 'work in progress':

It will be interesting to see how they all turn out when finished.

 

Colouring fabric at our February meeting

We met on 15 February to explore various ways of colouring fabric. Here are a few photos I took of what people were doing.

Some were mono printing:

Others were experimenting with glitter flakes:

Or with watercolour crayons:

At our next meeting on Sunday 22 March we will be trying out ways of using boutis and trapunto techniques in non-traditional ways. These are both techniques where the amount of wadding is varied in different parts of the design to emphasise some areas. My next post will show some examples.

Come along if you would like to experiment with these techniques, or to learn the basics working some small samples. You will be able to use either hand or machine stitching.

Folding, pleating and weaving at our January meeting

Lis brought along lots of her samples to our January meeting, so we had plenty of choice when it came to manipulated fabric techniques. Here are some of them:

Folding

Pleating

Weaving

Then we each chose one or more techniques to try. I'll post more images after our next meeting.