Studio Kit

Showing posts with label pellon stabilizer and lutradur. Show all posts

The madness that is (shhh!) CHRISTMAS. *ducks*

I know, I'm sorry - it's very early to be talking about Christmas, but the small pieces I made last year and sold before Christmas have been remembered, because I have had three inquiries already "When is your Christmas stock going to be ready?" - the first such inquiry was at the beginning of August! *shudder*

Although I didn't think of those small pieces that way at the time, they are of a size and price point that's perfect for gift-giving; and now that it's nearly October, I suppose I should get on with making them, right?

Sooo...

Okay. So, as you know, I work with Lutradur. I mean, I work with Lutradur a LOT.

Some people get pretty crazy with it - melting it, burning it, moulding it, all kinds of stuff. I paint it, and pretty much stick to that, because I have yet to experiment with all the permutations of "paint" that I could do with Lutradur - I like to "master" something (if I can) before I move on from it.

So, I had an idea for a piece I wanted to make.

Still working on it - you can see from this little mosaic that I added a fourth and fifth layer of leaves (and who knows, I may add another before it's all done) and then...

At various points, having made various birds, various people have said to me "this is my favourite one!" Well guess what?

This is MY favourite one! I love the background, the way the tree branches look like the evergreen bark I remember; the needle-y foliage and my bird. I love it, even if I do say so myself!

So, let's check out this bird, shall we?

All done!

Okay, I need to paint in that little stretch on the hem and I also need to paint the sides of the mounting board, but otherwise, it's done. :)

So, to recap...

You know how sometimes you get working on something and it just never feels "finished"? This is one of those instances for me.

After you saw it on Friday, I put another 11 or 12 hours into it adding more leaves, more hand stitching, more flowers, more grass... I could have kept going, but I got to the point where I realized if I spent any more time on it I would never be able to sell it. It's meant to go in a child's room after all ... :) JUST STOP KIT.

So let's get to the meat of it, shall we?

"Hiraeth"39" x 29"

In the late fall of 2012, there was a call for a challenge group I don't belong to - "self portrait". I had never done a self portrait and the idea sat in my head like background music that I didn't pay much attention to until I came across the word "hiraeth" on Facebook two weeks before Christmas.

I'm an avid reader, and work with words for a living, so I was curious enough to look up this unfamiliar word and learned that it was a Welsh word with no real English equivalent. But the closest equivalent is "homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost".

This may look somewhat familiar. :) I posted it in its original form slightly over a year ago - and the reason you're seeing it again in this updated version is because the curator of the Mermaid show (that "Little Karoo At Night is going to be in) contacted me last week and asked if she could have this one too.

"Yes," I said, "But I need to bring it up to speed!"

Because THIS was the original. Can you believe she even wanted it? lol)

(By the way - check out the difference between my my old Sony point-and-click [which is a pretty great camera for what it is] and my brand-new-last-week-Nikon!)

Before the curator even asked me for it, the fact is, I had already said to myself that it needed more "stuff" in it and could use some improving, so I'm glad I had a reason to do it!

So I got out my new favourite (lutradur), and painted some up! First, I made a fanciful little octopus, and then I made a conch that I'm pretty happy with (!)...

I bumped up the foliage by adding more sea grass and darkening it all up...

Adding some more details to the little sea bushes (I have no idea what those things are called)...

Adding a starfish and some squid....

And hey, do you notice a problem up there in the top right hand corner? Yeah, me too.

After I blocked it again (I had to put on a new backing and sleeve - I had no idea what I was doing when I made the first one!), the purple fish bled. ARGH!

So I applied a little bleach to take up the bleed, which of course turned the quilt into that area into a white island...

So I mixed up some paint and painted over it. Much better even if the green is slightly off.

I completely started over with the mermaid skin/body (the old one didn't even have a face!) and since I had made a young mermaid for Little Karoo, I decided to make this mermaid more mature.

And I gave her a pet/friend to look at!

All in all, much better, no? What do you think?

Making something new - a little pretty that I was inspired to make by seeing Snow White And The Huntsman. If you haven't seen the movie, there's a scene in the forest where the dwarves bring her to a secret place where fairies live ...

and they're green, androngynous, and big eared. lol I liked everything about them but their big ears; especially the idea that they were humanoid but genderless, (and not the sort of oddly sexualized version of fairies that are often portrayed in movies [I'm looking at you, Disney!])

Anyway - I went with my new favourite - lutradur to make the body - first a rough sketch, and then layered it with several gradations of olive green that I mixed up; and then a coating of new-grass-green for highlights.

Then I used a leftover scrap of the brown fabric that I made from roving for "Written On The Body" (careful, that link has frontal nudity! ;) )

... and thread painted some foliage on it. (My thread painting's getting better, no?)

And here it is from the back ('cause I know some of you like to see the back.)

On Wednesday, we're making wings! See you then...

When the little blue clock in the middle of his work
Sings a song to the moon up above
It is nature that's all
Simply telling us to fall in love....

And that's why birds do it,
bees do it,
even educated fleas do it,
Let's do it, let's fall in love!

When I was making this piece, for some reason, this Cole Porter lyric kept running through my head - so even though I was initially just making all those squiggly squares and circles,eventually I found myself making some flowers and leaves and insects, despite myself.

Although I had suggested in my last post that it probably would have made more sense to paint the stablizer/lutradur first and then cut it out, some of my little lines had gotten filled in with paint, and when I tried to re-cut them out with the heat tool, it worked, but...

all the paint got sticky and glommed up the tool - so... pick your evil. My preference would be to paint after. "Bees Do It" is 42" x 24, the bacground is scraps of black satin, wool, silk velvet, cotton and then quilted.

So, I'm done experimenting with the lutradur now, and will start actually working with it.... I actually have a piece done that I'm really excited to show you, but I can't until a MONTH from now (lol) so I'll have to maybe do some more thread work in the meantime, or start a new piece I have in mind about Angelique or another one I have in mind for a call for entry due in August.

Hmmmm...

Guess we'll all see on Monday! Have a great weekend, everyone!

A portion of the experiment.... not much to say about it (as this is, overall, a very simple, if large piece) - so it's stablizer, painted cream, and cut out with the heat tool...

But the finished piece will be available for your viewing pleasure on Friday. :)

Joining in with other Canadian Fiber people at The Needle and Thread Network.

All done!!!

All in all, I'm really pleased with this technique and I'm sure you'll see more of it in the pieces to come. For the next little while, I think, I'll be concentrating on painting the stabilizer and using it in these kinds of applications.

However, to recap what happened - I started out with my clean up cloth, which I interspersed with my "grid" pattern - I wanted it to represent an abstract city landscape.

Here is a close up of the actual organ grinder, which I first painted and then outlined with the "anime" pen (it's an artist's pen that's marketed for use for anime artists, but I can't remember what it's called). And his little painted gourd and other decorative elements, and his key to lock it up at the end of the day.

His face has a little sadness in it - as it would be I think; he is such an anachronism in our time - perhaps even the last of his kind - playing his music amongst the glass and steel...

And I had to show you his pants because I was so proud of them when I made them. As a beginning painter and one who is flying completely by the seat of her pants - when I did them, I worked intuitively, and in the end, I thought they looked quite good. Almost like a real painter!

But what it's taught me once again, is what I said at the beginning of the year - I need to take a drawing class and a water colour class!

Anyway, experiment done and I think he turned out rather well. I'm very pleased.

Have a great weekend everyone!

P.S. - Process posts here and here, and linking up with M-R of Quilt Matters for TGIFF -go check out what everyone's got finished this week!

You see, even though I'm playing, I wanted to continue to experiment with the possibilities of the stabilizer.

Here, you see the man in his more or less finished state, but I began the same way as with Trayvon's face...

Having first ironed fusible web to the stabilizer, peeled off the backing and put it on my glass, I sketched out my man in pencil and then cut him out using the heat tool.

And then I started painting him - right on the glass.

I used acrylic paint, blending to get the colours I wanted, and after this base was dry, I used an artist's (anime) pen to fill in the details - and speaking of details, I used a gold leaf pen on the rungs of the organ as well as in the decorative stars on it.

And I quilted the background with this great varigated thread that I've had forever and hadn't had a chance to use.

To see how it all comes together, come back on Friday!

And I'm linking up with the Needle And Thread Network - go check out what Canadians who work in fibre are up to!

How helpful and generous all of you are!

After my last post, I had several (nearly ten!) emails from people who privately offered me their collective wisdom in solving my "burning issues". I'll start by telling you how I temporarily solved them, and then share all of their great ideas!

So, when I left you last, I was trying to figure out a couple of things:
a:     where to get lutradur/what to use instead in my limited time frame; and
b:     what to use instead of Margaret Beal's heat tool.

The unspoken issues I had were:

a:    was it better to paint the substrate first and then put the fusible and then cut it out?
b:    should I put the fusible on before or after I cut and paint, or can it all be done at the same time?

To begin, when I asked Jennie where she got her Lutradur, she explained that, like me (I'd been looking for it for a project for Fire a couple of months ago) she hadn't been able to find it anywhere in Canada. So when she was in the UK a couple of weeks ago, she got a bolt of it.

When she pulled it out to cut a piece off for me, I said "It looks like Pellon stabilizer!"

And SHE said - "It's made by Pellon". And I smacked myself in the head, because I have three bolts of the stuff myself, in different weights, that I bought at the Creativ Festival a couple of years ago.

At the time, I thought I was going to do a lot more thread painting (I was very taken with an exhibition of it I had seen during Quilt National in 2009) but had never really gotten 'round to it.

When I got home, I realized that none of my weights were exactly like hers, but they were probably close enough to bright, so I went for it.

The first experiment was with the heaviest of the weights I had. I cut it first, and then painted it, and THEN added the fusibile and cut it out a second time. (Which is the first pic in this post.)

Then I tried painting the stabilizer, and fusing it, then cutting it, but I couldn't see through it without a light box. I don't have one, so I used my drafting table (glass top) and a desk lamp underneath - but it's not a user-friendly option unless you have a lightbox, so I wouldn't recommend painting the stabilizer first.

And speaking of, what did I cut it with, you ask?

Well, Jennie had very generously offered to lend me her burning tool to complete the project.

However, I had done some research, and decided that its closest cousin was the Dremel Wood Burning Tool Kit (which had an attachment with a very fine point - more on that later)

I also had a very light weight Pellon, nearly translucent, that had some fusible on it already. I had been fusing that Pellon to delicate silks and lightweight chiffons to enable me to work with them more easily in other applications in the past, so thought I'd give that one a go.

I knew that the small amount of fusible on it would be useless in this particular application, so I fused the Steam-A-Seam to it, cut it to size, and then peeled off the back, using that bit of sticky-ness to adhere it to the glass.

Then I slid the whole over my image (I took the original sketch, blew it up and darkened it at a professional copy place) and commenced to cut. It worked a dream! (And my head is already filled with other applications for my Pellon and my heat tool!)

You can see that I used the tool to make more marks to "scuff it up" as you may remember the orignal rendering looked very "abused" and I wanted that look rather than the "brand spanking new" look I got with other fabrics.

Here it is all cut on on the glass - remember, it already has the fusible attached!

Now - here are the hints from all of the generous people!

No sooner did I post, than Arlee Barr wrote me and suggested that I use the Walnut Hollow "Textile Tool", and a few people wrote and suggested the Creative Versa Tool by the same company. Liniecat sent me several emails with different suggestions for both tools and sources for Lutradur, and Beth Berman sent me info on how to enlarge my image. Others wrote me and made other helpful suggestions as well, from soldering irons to wood burning tools, a couple of you also suggested the Dremel Wood Burning kit I had already found.

Ladies - all of you - I'm truly touched by your generosity of spirit and helpfulness! Apparently, there's nothing we can't solve together. :)