Category Archives: fabric

More adventures in shibori

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I also made another piece using stitching and gathering to provide a resist against the dye. This time I used a sewing machine to stitch parallel lines before tightly gathering the fabric. As with other piece, when I use this method again I will hand stitch, removing the machine stitching from gathered material was a real pain.

This piece was dyed at the same time as the “circles” shibori, again I removed the stitching while it was still wet. This is the result:

As you can see my stitching was less straight towards the bottom but I think the effect is still lovely.

This piece also became a book cover, first I stitched a couple of pleats into the fabric to add extra texture to the final fabric.

Then I laid out white merino top along the pale purple lines to maintain the contrast.

Before laying out 2 layers of merino top.

Here it is after felting, with the pleats giving added texture.

And the final product – an A4 book cover:

Mosaic Quilting Part 2

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Well, this has proved much more challenging than I had imagined. Laying the pieces out and ironing them into place was fiddly but enjoyable, I like the creativity of laying out the little pieces, thinking about how the light would play on this scene.

Cutting the batting and backing fabric and attaching it to the interfacing, all very easy and straight forward. In large part the ease of this step was due to 505 basting spray, if you have not tried this yet you are missing out. It is brilliant! It allows you to re-position your pieces for about 15 min after spraying them and then keeps the fabric glued together for 2-4 months or until you wash them. Amazing stuff!

The misery did not start until I tried add some machine stitching. Then either the little pieces of fabric that I had so carefully placed either fell off or folded over to get stitched in half. What a mess! :o( To cap it all off, while intently trying to flatten each piece of fabric as the machine foot went over them I failed to notice the centre of the piece was starting to balloon and warp away from the batting.

What would I do differently next time?

  • I would use wonderweb for the backing not interfacing (I think wonderweb will be more “sticky”)
  • Although Terri Stegmiller does not recommend it I would be tempted to iron the wonderweb onto the fabric pieces before cutting them into fragments, although this will need more wonderweb than Terri’s method, I think it will hold the edges of the fragments down better making them less likely to fold over or detach.
  • Stitch from the centre of the quilt outwards. I did plan to do that on this quilt but got carried away stitching the wavy lines for the sea : embarrassed : 

This is what it currently looks like…

All is not lost, I will persevere and hope to resurrect this piece into something beautiful.

P.S. I have had a really fun idea for a small felted Xmas gift that makes me chuckle whenever I think of it, I will make a prototype this weekend and share the results with you next week.

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