Happy Scrappy Hearts

The little boxes I keep on my cutting table for all the little leftover scraps from projects are filling up

 and are inspiring in themselves,

I opened the one with all the blues and greens and enjoyed an afternoon last week

making these little Scrappy happy hearts.

I was going to make them hanging hearts,

 then I thought they might look nice adorning a wreath,

 but they are so tactile I feel more inclined to display them loose,

where they can be picked up

 touched and held

 in your hand

 they are lovely to hold and

 so full of happy!

So they are

 available as is

 to do with what you wish and enjoy........here



Foliage to Fabric

Fabric Leaf embellishments

From foliage to fabric

I love using transfer mediums especially

fabric crayons and paints

The simple leaves from my yellow rose were perfect for taking rubbings from with the crayons

I painted over these with the transfer paints

and cut them out

I laid these out face down onto white cotton fabric, covered with more fabric to hold the paper cut outs in place then pressed them with a hot iron.

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I didn't get a good picture of the transferred images before the next stage but have since did some more of these and decided to iron the image onto pale green cotton shirt fabric to good effect.

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Transferred images covered with little pieces of chiffon and organza fabrics

 free machine stitched around the outlines

You can still see the leaf crayon imprints through the organza

Then I went a bit mad and had some fun with some more free machine embroidery

 trimmed to the stitched edge

Fabric Leaf embellishments

Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial

Transfer paints by Decca

Fabric transfer crayons by Crayola

Prisma Petals

Prisma Petals

I have been playing around so much with my 'Rose' theme and have so many things to share it's difficult to know where to begin ... It started with the simple petal.

From a beautiful bunch of flowers I was given at Easter time I took a single yellow rose that was starting to wilt. I wanted petals in shades of pink and had an idea.

 I removed the petals and laid them out on a sheet of white paper.

and took a picture

Then I changed it to black and white and lightened it up

I popped a couple of printed copies of this into my sketchbook  before we set off for a weekend break away.

I also took my Prismacolour Pencils.

See what happened

The dark areas add depth to the hand coloured image

Pink Petals!

When cut out they look quite good !

A page in my book.......

Other possibilities that came to mind....... colour in paint shop pro (or similar editing software)

 save image and print on to image transfere sheet then transfere to fabric.

or just photograph your handcoloured petals and print onto transfere sheets.

Playing around with image size could be interesting too.......

I will add this at the side of my blog as a tutorial link for easy reference.

The Soul of the Rose

A beautiful title for this lovely painting by John William Waterhouse and one of my favourites by the artist. It perfectly describes the feelings it evokes when I admire it.

I have decided to work within the theme of roses on my experimental journey .....

I've been making lots of mess in my little studio......I'll show you a little bit of what I've been up too

 I wanted to spend more time exploring thread sketching. Some of you may have read my post here about my little play around after seeing it in issue of Cloth Paper Scissors.

So with my theme of roses in mind I had another little play around,

first some sketching.......

I used cartridge paper from a sketchbook

then I added some printed text paper to highlight

I then painted these with artist watercolours and free machine stitched, highlighting the shapes and lines.

 I used an embroidery foot, regular black sewing thread and dropped the feed dogs on my machine.

I forgot to photograph the roses before I stitched nor the stitching process, when I get excited about going on to the next stage I sometimes forget opps

 I also added some gold foil and coloured cellophane from Cadbury's roses chocolates

here are some close ups

textured paper

a leaf skeleton

embossed paper....

pink textured foil

purple cellophane sweet wrapper

I'm pleased with the results..............

here's a better view of the ochre one, I think the paint is a little thick on this, I might wet it and remove some..... see what emerges

 I like the shape and flow of this one....

picture is a bit blurry,

a closer view.

Its great fun to thread sketch .....have a go if you do I would love to see