Tuesday, November 22, 2016

All That Glitters

Front on top; back on the bottom (with little bits of tissue paper)
Cutting that nifty shiny thread fabric has resulted in lots of glitter:  all over my clothes, the cutting mat, the floor and in my laptop keyboard.  Damn.  At least it's pretty.

I pulled threads from the leftover cuttings and made another piece of thread fabric.  Using a fabric backing had pros and cons.  It's stable and opaque, but bulky, can't be easily appended together, it's not reversible and some of the fabric edges fray when cut).  I understand why some tutorials instruct using water soluble stabilizer on both sides.  I will do that next time.

I didn't have much left stabilizer left, so I tried a tissue paper backing.  The tissue didn't all disintegrate or pull out, but I like this result better that the fabric backing.  It's a bit thinner.  I can easily sew small pieces together to make a bigger piece.  This was a dense chunk, but I considered what a looser "weave" would look like.  You'd be able to see the fabric it's appliqued to through the gaps.  Oh!  So many ways to play with this!

I have laid out my main project - have the colors picked, the hearts all cut, it's ready to piece.  Raw edge applique seemed the way to go with this.  I've never done that before - I don't like how messy it looks.  But these pieces are messy!  I felt a clean edge would clash with the rest of the hearts.  As I pondered how to applique it, I also thought about how to quilt it on the new machine.  So many things new things I've not attempted before - did I want to risk trying them out on this quilt?

I stopped my work to make a smaller version with the extra pieces.

A practice run was the thing to do!  The hearts seemed so thick when I cut them out, but they flattened as I stitched them to the fabric.  They spread out a little, too.  I'll need to keep that in mind for my "real" project. 


I picked a quilting pattern for the mini quilt but couldn't imagining what it would look like even after I doodled it several times over.  I've seen people use dry erase markers with plexiglas to help visualize their quilting.  Turns out I had a bunch of old clear report covers (I use the spines as chew-guards in the guinea pig cage) that worked great for this.  I need to buy a fine-tip dry erase marker, but I some dry erase crayons did the trick for now.  I drew the waves side-to-side, but the up-and-down orientation makes me think of confetti.  We'll see if I like it as much when I stitch it.

Once I finish with the little one I'll be ready to tackle the real thing.  I'm loving how it looks.

Sharing with Freemotion by the River's Linky Tuesday.

2 comments :

  1. Your designs always seem evocative to me...I immediately thought of topographic lines (the horizontal background) and underwater vegetation, swaying in the current (vertical background)!

    ReplyDelete
  2. How very crafty of you. It's a great concept, and you seem to be enjoying experimenting.

    ReplyDelete

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