Project 6 Applique

The next part of this project was to sew some of these combinations of fabrics together. 

I chose to use a machine for this, really because it was quicker.

The first photo shows the two layers of applique I made for the water design.

The grey fabric is stretch rayon, so was difficult to keep flat, even with a walking foot. 

I found my machining skills were a bit rusty after all this work on paper.

 

For the water design, I didn't have anything blue or watery.
I chose to try it out in varieties of grey and black
because I wanted to try out these combinations of fabrics,
not because I thought it would particularly work with this design.

This is the two combined, superimposed on the design
that it comes from. Not sure how well it would work if it were
in the right sort of calm colours,
but it was good practice for machine applique.

This one started with the combination of fabrics I wanted for the postbox picture. I sewed round in ovals because that's the shape in the photo, and then followed my instincts and ended up with this.
I think it would look good with gold instead of the heavy woven beige as pupil and interstices.

I started this one by putting loose crumpled pieces of organdie
under a voile, because I thought they would look more like the surface
of the fruit not sewn down. I'm not sure that's true now!.
Then I tried out some other rows of beads. I like the way the
black spot in the middle of the glass beads reflects
the black printed pattern on the fabric,
and how the glass itself distorts the pattern.
Then I folded the voile once and twice to see the effect.
I think it would have more effect on a stronger background.

This is me trying Tyvek paper.
I cut it into one of the fish oil photo shapes,
painted the ends rusty orange with gouache, and then
heated it.  This is an interesting effect and I can see
myself using it for all sorts of organic things.

This was my take on the tree fern pictures, using muslin stiffened and glued with bondaweb. Very useful stuff.

The machining took me a while to get the speed right for the curves!

I made the triangles out of two layers of a different striped fabric with a rougher texture, and you can't see here but I cut through the top layer so as to fray it a bit, but it didn't want to fray.

I left the ends of the lower threads on them to add to the waviness.

I think the pale blue and white looks very pretty together, although it isn't anything like the mood of the original drawings. The white isn't quite strong enough to hold its own, so if I did it again I might use a less transparent fabric, or a couple more layers of muslin. In fact, thinking about it, a few layers of wavy lines might make it a better reflection of the messy look of the original design.

I want to try it with dark colours of fabric, perhaps with some shiny and some matt, to try to give the mysterious earthy look.


















I found this exercise inspiring, and I want to do more!
I liked the way the layering took me off in other directions, not just sticking to the designs I had already done (see the red piece). And that this happened just by using the 'wrong' colour combinations for two of the designs.
I also wanted to do some more 3D/ relief things, but held off until the next exercise.