More ATCspecially featured pieces

I'm carrying on with my descriptions of the pieces made for publication in the ART specially for You Magazine, issue 5. One you will have seen before but above is another picture. You can read all about how it was created on an earlier blog post here. As you can see, it's a companion piece to the piece shown next!

The other piece picture above here is called Souls Reaching Heaven and features one of my Haikus. In this piece I have used both pieces of the actual fabric paper collage as well as a piece of the same fabric paper collage but this time scanned into my computer and printed out onto inkjet cotton sheet (from Crafty Computer Paper). Stamps and images are all by Alphastamps.

Make the background for Souls Reaching Heaven out of a sandwich formed by a 15cm square (or 6" square) piece of blue fabric, wadding (batting) and a backing fabric. Quilt this using one of the decorative stitches on your sewing machine. Cut a 10cm (4") square piece from the printed cotton sheet and sew this onto the centre of the blue fabric quiltie with a machine zigzag stitch. Add size 11 blue seed beads along this edge by hand.

Cut 3 x 2.5cm (1") , so called inchies, pieces from your original fabric paper background and sew these in place onto the piece as shown in the picture above, slightly offset to the right.

The Haiku has been written using a Dymo writer (black on transparent tape) and reads as follows:

Birds reaching for food

flapping their wings

and singing

Souls reaching heaven

Sew this text around the centre square as shown in the picture.

Finish the edges with a pink transparent ribbon and add a little pink button in all four corners.

All the other pieces featured in the ART specially for You magazine have been featured on this blog before.

Fly Away Collage

As promised I'm continuing my translations of my article in the ARTspecially for You Magazine. This time I'm concentrating on the first piece I made with the fabric paper collage made in the previous post. Start by cutting a 20 cm (approx. 8") square from that fabric paper collage and put it down on a piece of white felt of the same size. Sew the two pieces together along the edges by machine with transparent thread. Add the image of the lady (from one of my own vintage postcards and printed out by computer on paper) as well as the 3 bird transparencies (from Alphastamps Parrots sheet) and sew them on in positions as shown. Add the text I want to fly (made with a Dymo writer on transparent, self-adhesive tape) and sew this next to the words Fly Away that formed part of the original fabric paper collage.

Make the background (30 square cm or 12" square) from a sandwich of cream fabric, wadding (batting) and calico (muslin). Quilt this sandwich using one of the decorative stitches on your sewing machine. Put the piece made above on top and in the centre of this sandwich and sew down using a satin stitch on your sewing machine. Add size 11 seed beads in a variety of colours along this edge by hand.

Stamp birds (from Cavallini's Birds and Nests box of stamps) 14 times onto a transparency using black Staz-On ink and cut them out. Sew them along the background as shown reversing them 7 times so that the birds face in the right directions.

Finally by hand and using a variegated thread add buttonhole stitch along all the outside edges of the piece.

Fabric Paper Collage

This is it then, the translation of my article in the ART specially for You Magazine. Angela, the editor, has made me laugh by introducing it with the words that it seems to be my mission in life to make everyone sew. How right she is!! I will put words which are different in America in brackets after the British word!

Start with a piece of unbleached calico (muslin), no larger than about A3 size and iron it carefully. Stamp it with your selection of stamps (in my case I've used Alphastamps and Cavallini Bird and Nests box stamps). Use ink which is suitable for fabric such as Fabrico or Versacraft. I've used a selection of different colours. It's not necessary to make a very careful design as the piece will be cut up for backgrounds later. Just let yourself go, starting with the largest stamps, then the medium sized ones and finishing by filling in with the small ones. Leave the stamped calico (muslin) to dry for approx. 24 hours. After that iron it carefully to set the ink. Err on the side of caution and do it longer than you think is necessary as a lot of liquid will be added to your fabric during the next step and you don't want your ink to run!!

Also stamp white tissue paper with more detailed stamps if you want to use those in your project. These tend not to show on fabric and this is a good way of adding them to your collage in the next step.

Now it's time to actually make the collage itself. Collect together a selection of vintage texts and pictures. I regularly buy old books and albums from the 19th Century specially for this purpose as these are free of copyright. It's a bit difficult to start cutting into these but you get used to it pretty quickly! Tear the edges to integrate these pieces better into the collage.

You will also need paper serviettes (napkins). For the examples I used serviettes (napkins) with flowers and music but anything goes. Only the top layer from the serviette (napkin) is used so remove the extra white layers before you start. Other items you will need to make the collage are PVA glue, water, and fabric paint which is very liquid. I use Dye-na-Flow but thin silk paint also works very well. A 1" brush (cheap!!)

Making the collage:

1. Thin the PVA glue down with approx. 2 parts of water and put down plastic underneath your fabric to protect your working surface. It's hard to say how much water to add to the glue. Not so much that it does not glue adequately but not so little that the resulting piece is stiff. It's a matter of trial and error, think the consistency of buttermilk

2. With the brush spread the water/PVA glue mixture generously all over your calico (muslin) till it is well soaked.

3. Tear or cut the old text, pictures, music etc. and put them onto the calico which is now soaked in the water/glue mixture. It's not necessary to do this in any organized fashion as the background will be cut up later. Don't cover the entire background, you want the stamps to remain partially visible! Cover these new additions with the glue/water mixture too.

4. The next layer is formed by the paper napkins and the stamped tissue paper. Tear these into smaller pieces and add them to the background, partially obscuring the items added in step 3. After they dry the serviettes (napkins) and tissue paper are completely transparent so whatever is underneath them will also be visible. Add the glue mixture to these additions too.

5. The final step is to add the fabric paint. The piece is now well soaked with the glue mixture so the paint will spread well. Use the Dye-na-Flow squeeze bottles and let go with wild abandon (you might want to wear an apron for this step!) or use a teaspoon and just dribble away. Don't use more than 2 or 3 colours otherwise you will just get a browny mess!

6.If you like you can also add some Art Glitter at this stage.

7. Let the whole collage dry for at least 24 hours on your plastic background. It's important to make sure it is completely dry before proceeding with the next step.

8. Iron the dried collage (cotton setting on your iron) but make absolutely sure that you use baking parchment between your iron and the collage and it is also a good idea to use it underneath your collage too! This prevents glue getting onto your iron or ironing board (and transferring to your husbands' uniform shirts, guess how I know this!!)

9. The collage is now ready to use but before I start cutting into it I scan it into my computer first so that I can use it in the future too.

The collage is now a mixture of fabric and paper which means you can still stitch on it, both by hand and machine, with the greatest ease.

More about the pieces I made with this particular fabric/paper collage in the very near future on this blog!

Published in ARTspecially

The latest (Autumn 2008) issue of the ARTspeciallyforYou magazine arrived today and what a treat for the eyes it was. I'm not just saying that because I'm published in it but because it really is one of the most beautifully produced magazines that I deal with. In house photography and a great lay-out artist contribute to a magazine that you really want to treasure.

It is however entirely in Dutch apart from its title so I promise that before too long (i.e. in the next few days) I will publish a translation into English of the text of my article on this blog, specially as it discusses the way I make fabric/paper collages. For the moment I'm giving you a quick peek at the image page for the article. All supplies for these pieces, stamps and images used are from Alphastamps.

S is for Somebody

We're moving fast towards the end of the Alphabet in our Round Robin Alphabetica swap and this month I'm making S and T pages for Debby whose theme is vintage children. My first page was going to be S is for Sepia but someone else had already made a page for someone else's album with that title so I decided to find a different S word.

I made a fabric/paper collage and there seems to have been a lot of interest in that process as I've received various e-mails asking for details. I have just written an article describing it in depth for a Dutch magazine (ARTspecially) which will come out either in October or January. When it has been published I will put a full English translation (the article is in Dutch!) on this blog with pictures of the process so keep an eye out!

For Debby's page I used a paper napkin which she had send me for my birthday in August and I painted the page using ecru and orange Dye-na-Flow but I had used them too sparingly and I felt the page needed a bit of a lift so I sprayed it with Tattered Angel (a sort of red/orange shade) Glimmer Mist. This is not permanent on fabric but is fine as long as you don't wash the item in question. As this is an album page it won't matter. I also used a vintage image from the newspaper (an recent article on children at play in the early 20th Century) and vintage music text which included the word Somebody several times.

I added the glitter S (from Glitterbugs) and a vintage velvet flower (Lost Art Creations) which seemed to have been made for this page. The Somebody text was added with a 7Gypsies rub-on alphabet sheet.

Published in ArtSpecially

Today I was surprised by the arrival of the latest issue (no. 3) of the Art Specially for You magazine. This is a Dutch publication (although you would not guess this from the title!!), dedicated to all things to do with stamping and related arts. I'd written a small introduction about myself and my fabric art for them and it really looks gorgeous. The text, needless to say, is in Dutch which is my mother tongue although I haven't spoken it regularly for years now and writing in it presented quite a challenge. All those dictations in primary school proved to have been totally in vain!

The quality of the pictures is really good and I'm providing you with a taster of my pages above.

It looks way better in the actual magazine, in which I have to say all the illustrations are of superb quality. The editor insisted on photographing the art in house and I can now clearly see what a difference this makes to how the pictures look. You can buy the magazine here.

Hope it won't all be Double Dutch to most of you!!