More fun with fibre

Well, I had to wait for the backing of the next quilt to dry (it was flannel, I did the pre-shrinking) and had some time on my hands this afternoon.

Some of those pieces of fibre surface from yesterday were tickling my fingertips, along with a bunch of thread clippings (actually set aside for paper making), and this whole fusing idea - they were begging to be put all together!

I started out with a really, REALLY bright red fabric as my foundation, then fused a bunch of the thread tidbits to it, trying to evenly cover the whole works. Once they were firmly on, I tried putting some Angelina fibres on there, too . Drawing on my pile of sample stabilizers, tried out something called 'trick film', a stabilizer that's supposed to go on top of the area to be stitched, then melted away with a warm iron. I popped that on, then proceeded to stitch through to help hold down all the wayward fibres. After lots of happy stitching, I tried to melt away the stabilizer. Without singeing the Angelina fibres(!). Not so easy, as it turns out.

The stabilizer didn't, no matter what I did, disappear completely - but has left a delicate cobwebby layer over top of the whole thing (this is where I wipe my brow and say thank goodness it's just an experiment)! The plastic look of the areas that still have stabilizer reminded me of the vinyl from yesterday, so the whole piece was a natural for continuing along the same vein as the feather card.

Thus, the next bunch of ATCs (shown in lower row of the photo at the top of the post).

It was a lot of fun to cut this up and mount it on the watercolour paper. I think my favorites are the ones with the dark blue thread. The coral, while subtle and lovely, doesn't have very much impact from more than, say, 12" away. Also the blue thread makes the pieces more about the primary colours - something that tends to be a recurring theme in my work.

Youngest kept me company during this time, making his own ATCs, some with stitching and enclosed fibres, too.

O! The dryer stopped. Time to mount that backing and get going on the next quilt!

May all your ATCs be 2.5 X 3.5"...

Lisa