Category Archives: fabric

Fabric Bowls

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After making a felt and scrim fabric bowl a few weeks ago I have been experimenting with alternative ways of stiffening fabrics. The water soluble fabric worked well and has produced a moderately stiff bowl but I am concerned that if it gets wet it will loose its shape and possibly its strength too.

As an alternative I have been experimenting with PVA glue (commonly used in schools for art classes and also known as wood glue).

Here is a bowl made from 4 layers of rainbow dyed scrim, machine embroidery for decoration and PVA glue.

A close up of the embroidered centre:

However, it is still quite malleable…

I would like to stiffen it some more, but am not sure how, some possibilities include threading coloured wires through the fabric or spraying with a diluted mix of acrylic medium but I’m not sure I really like either idea. Do any of you clever people have better /other ideas?

Textile Bowl and the Finished Apron

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I adapted Ruth Lane’s felt scrap bowl tutorial to include a piece of hand-dyed cotton scrim to make a small textile bowl from felt and fabric scraps. The method involves laying out your fabric scraps on a piece of water-soluble fabric (WSF), creating a sandwich by adding a second piece of WSF, pinning it together and using free-motion embroidery all over it so that all the pieces of fabric are stitched together. Here is my layout (scrim on the botttom, then WSF with felt and fabric scraps – I put another sheet of WSF on top of this):

Here is the finished bowl after wetting out the WSF and leaving it to dry over another bowl:

I most like how the scrim has solidified and looks like water splashing up from the surface of a pond.

I am really pleased with how the apron turned out, all those hours applying wax were worth it in the end! It’s not very obvious from the photo but there are lots of pale greens and blue still visible from the original rainbow dyeing. The label said it was 100% cotton but clearly the waist straps aren’t. I have sprayed it with clear plasti-drip to water-proof it and hope to find out on Sunday if that has worked…

And a close up:

Linking up to nina-marie, off the wall Friday