Thursday, March 15, 2007

Fabric Page Swap

After a couple of false starts, this is the fabric page I made for Sarah in the Fibre Art Friends Fabric Page Swap.
Sarahs theme is ‘A Womans Work is Never Done’ in shades of green.
I found this one really difficult.
Eventually I found some illustrations from an old book called the Good Housewifes Encyclopaedia.
I wanted the page to have a look of the 40/50’s about it so I used calico as the base fabric. For the front cover I used an ‘old typewriter’ text printed onto a piece of T Shirt transfer paper. I wanted this to look like one of those plastic tablecloths that used to be popular back then.
In case you are wondering, we leave a 1" border around the edge for the recipient to finish off in whichever way she chooses once all the pages have been received.


When you open the ‘book’ each page shows a different ‘How to’ to make you the perfect housewife!!
I printed these in black and white onto calico that had been treated with InkAid and then outlined different shapes with various green threads. Pelmet Vilene is sandwiched between the pages to make them stiff. I attached the pages using some old green ribbon.





These are the two false starts I had.

For the first one I printed words associated with housework (womans work??) onto a piece of prepared fabric. I then used the embroidery machine to embroider the phrase ‘A Womans Work…’ I stitched this down onto layers of green fabric and slashed through. Added a few buttons to liven it up but it didn’t work – very boring.



The second one is also a pile of green fabrics, with a red one in the middle, layered together. I found a couple of old adverts showing happy, smiling housewifes and printed these onto T-Shirt transfer paper. Did a very wobbly satin stitch border – its very difficult to stitch into this stuff, it is really slippery. The lettering was once again created on the embroidery machine before layering. That I think was my first mistake. I used muslin for the top layer and it moved around a lot which is why the wording is a bit uneven.
The idea was to slash the whole lot around the pictures and the words but after a couple of rows I realised this was just not going to work.

For next month my page swap is with Terri ‘StegArt’ whose theme is ‘Nature’.

9 comments:

Sarah said...

Girl!!! I LOVE my beautiful page you made! Great design, fit with theme perfectly! THANK YOU!

Alis Clair said...

This is such a great page. Perfect feel for the 50's.
Hugs, Alis

Terri Stegmiller said...

You did a great job on Sarah's page. Looking forward to next month!

Anonymous said...

A womans work is never done......nor is dad's ironing!

Dianne said...

This is a fantastic page - love how it all opens out.

Unknown said...

Fabulous page, love the imagery, and the fold out pages

marisa said...

thanks for your visit on my blog.ciao

Barbara said...

many creation tipps for me.!! i will visit again!! Grates Barbara

Fiona said...

fantastic! great use of the illustrations (and you've kept them as illustrations, clean and bold) and love the construction (must use that idea too!) you produce so much!