For Jan, Terri and Me!

Another set of ‘inchies’ for the Textile Challenges group swap. This time for Jan whose colour choice is metallic, something I do enjoy working with.
I finished the squares and the tags, lined them up to take a photo, then realised I had made TEN of them! Yet another ‘senior moment’! The tags were once again made from heavyweight watercolour paper with scrunched up tissue paper glued on top. These tags are about the size of a normal luggage tag. Labels detailing the techniques I used were put on and the ‘string’ in the top of the tags is made from lengths of coloured copper wire.


For the Fibre Art Friends monthly page swap my partner for April is Terri whose theme is ‘Nature’.
I decided to try my hand at ‘traditional’ for this one – but somehow I don’t think I quite pulled it off.
I chose a sketch by William Morris for his first wallpaper design ‘Trellis’ as my inspiration. Plenty of nature in there!
The background fabric is silk noil, tea dyed to age it slightly. I traced the pattern onto stabilizing paper and machine embroidered the design from the back. The appliquéd leaf shapes were made using the Bernina embroidery module, the birds were hand drawn with pen and ink and the flowers and the background have been coloured in with fabric paints. Some of the trellis has been hand stitched using a woven stitch.

For the tag I aimed to print the original sketch onto fabric. This was scanned into PSP and I started to play around with the artistic effects, which gave me another idea.
This time I used a blue silk velvet background – a much nicer blue than the photograph shows. Once again I machine embroidered the piece from the back, catching in some organza in places which I cut back afterwards. The leaves were made again using the embroidery machine and a metallic thread and some of the flowers have been appliquéd on using organza. This piece is very hard to capture properly in a photograph.

And finally, the most exciting bit. I won this bag in the Earth Day Auction organised by Joanna of Serenity is Bliss. Fibre Artists were invited to send in pieces of art which would then be auctioned off on Ebay to raise funds.
This bag was made by Carol McFee of Textile Tales who comes from, in my opinion, one of the best parts of the U.K. - Conwy in North Wales. She sent it to Joanna in New York who then sent it back to me in Essex. A much travelled bag.
I’ve put up pictures of the front and back, both sides being gorgeous I really don’t know which is which, and a close up. Wonderful.