So what have I done this week? For pennies I have shortened two dresses and a pair of shorts, and repaired a pretty multi-coloured chiffon dress. I wish I could have been shortening this dress, as I really coveted a bit of the fabric...
On the fun side I have made four fabric postcards for a swap on Art We Mail. The theme was "Quilter's Delight" using any quilting method. As the suggestions given were "foundation piecing" or "crazy quilting" I took this to mean that quilting equaled patchwork rather than the actual process of stitching the layers together, and used this as the basis. Some months ago I experimented with using fabric dye felt tips to dye cloth rather than just draw patterns on the surface. Not having used large pieces of material, I cut the dyed cloth into strips, stitched them together and made a bargello cushion-top. This has been sitting around ever since, so I separated it into 7x5 inch blocks, then used the flower stamps we had carved at Craft Club last year to stamp a flower into the centre of each square. I left this overnight to dry, and then ironed the ink to set it. The next afternoon I sat and watched the Tour de France mountain stage while I basted batting to the blocks and did a little top stitching through all layers using threads I had dyed with the felt tips. The postcards have to be 4x6 inches when finished, so I cut a hole this size in a piece of card and placed it over the front of each block until I was happy with the part that showed, put a pin in each corner, then flipped it over and lined up a 4x6 inch piece of pelmet vilene with the pins and ironed it into place with wundaweb. The next stage was to machine around as close as I could get to the edge of the vilene, trim back the block to the edge using a rotary cutter and a ruler, and the final stage was to put a close zig-zag stitch around the card to finish off. I have yet to experiment with a pen on the pelmet vilene. I need to find something that will write legibly and not run if it should happen to get wet in the course of its delivery. Yes, these are postcards; they are meant to go in the post as they are, stamped of course, and hopefully hand-franked rather than fed into a machine, but we shall see how the local office copes with my request.
They look rather flat and uninteresting in this scan, and the colours look muddy, but I am hopefull that they look better "in the flesh".
It is nice to find something addressed to "Totty" in the postbox. Yesterday it was these two ATCs from Renske. The black and white fish were in exchange for my goldfish, and the Geisha a thank you gift for the extras I sent with it.
Not such a fun project was to make a Sympathy card for Bubs on the death of her mother. Losing our Mums seems to be becoming a regular occurrence on CardScraps. Another sign that time flies..
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.