Author Archives: Teri Berry

Feeling chuffed

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Part of my New Year’s non-resolution was to spend more time being creative and to that end I bought some extra annual leave from work (not cheap but I think it was worth it), so I took today as annual leave to be crafty ;o) I’ve had quite a productive day, finishing a low relief sample from a monoprint for my C&G course:

And started felting some rainbow dyed cotton scrim for a hooded scarf, still a way to go yet but I’m liking the colours. As usual I have wandered off brief and used a carded mix of colours instead of plain white merino tops. With some careful stitching I’m hoping I can make it reversible. This is the wooly side:

And the dyed cotton side:

I also started some samples exploring acrylic paints on prefelt, I am testing acrylic paint on their own, with an iridescent additive and both of these with and without a textile additive for acrylic paint. Then I repeated these samples on wet and dry felt. This is what they look like while I (im)patiently wait for them to dry. The bars in the middle are some commercial fabric paints. Next step is to iron fix them and see how well they stand up to felting.

Last week I had a lucky win on Ebay, I bid on 8 metres of blue silk chiffon and won it for just under £33. It’s pretty shade of royal blue, actually appears to be silk (I’ve lost track of the number of times I have bought things on Ebay that have turned out to be something different than described) and is in good condition.

Best of all, I conducted an experiment using discharge paste on it today and it worked!! Here are the results, the white grid is where I painted the paste on. It was so easy!

I feel the urge to do some shibori discharge dyeing….

And just in case you think I forgot about the Q1 challenge, here is a sneaky peek of what it currently looks like….

(linked to Off the Wall Fridays)

Laminating painted fabrics

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I have been laminating the fabric painted and printed for my City and Guilds course. Most have been successful, the only one that really gave me trouble was the polyester, despite rolling for 30 min it still only attached in a few small areas. I’m not sure whether this will be seen as cheating or being innovative but after the third attempt I decided to try another tack; stitching to prefelt before felting.

This is what it looked like before felting:

And after:

These are the other printed and painted fabrics I laminated:
The organza was much more successful and I think the sheen on it is much prettier

Silk chiffon, this one resulted in the least puckering and the truest representation of the original design

Cotton muslin with carded top behind, this one has some lovely puckering that compliments the painted design:

Cotton scrim – I think the green merino has worked much better than the white as a backdrop for the monoprint.

This was the piece of cotton muslin with the glitter and 3D paints, the bronze 3D paint worked remarkably well but the glitter has lost some of its intensity during felting.