Tuesday 24 April 2007

Fabric Postcards

I am doing a postcard swap with Kate in Cyprus. For this card I painted a piece of tissue paper with deep red acrylic paint and ironed it to Fast2fuse. I laid a skeleton leaf on top of the wet paint and painted the leaf the same colour as the background. Once the paint was dry I applied some treasure gold on top to enhance the veins of the leaf. I painted lightweight tyvek (paper not fabric tyvek) with the same red paint (Liquitex acrylic) on both sides. Once the paint was dry I cut the tyvek into strips and stitched them randomly on the card using a gold metallic thread. I did some free motion stitching on the background using the same metallic thread I thought this would save the background getting burnt when I heated the tyvek. I then heated the tyvek with the heat tool to shrink it. I learned a while ago that the skeleton leaves don't burn when heated they act as a a resist so the background wasn't affected by heating the tyvek.
For this card I first made sheets of angelina fibres by spreading some of the fibres between two sheets of baking parchment and ironed them lightly with my iron set on a wool setting (No 2). I then took each sheet of angelina and heated it directly with the iron set on silk setting. If the iron is too hot the angelina will stick to the iron - silk setting worked for me. I folded and pulled on the angelina sheet as I ironed it the second time which gave a completely different look to the fibres. I free motion stitched the angelina fibres to the background - navy cotton ironed to a base of Fast2fuse. The beads are strung on metallic wire and couched by hand to the background.

11 comments:

Françoise said...

I like both cards. But the skeleton leaf one is my favourite. It's gorgeous!

Gypsy Purple said...

What a lovely blog you have!!!

Unknown said...

I love them both, but the red one is my favourite!!!

Nellie's Needles said...

Beautiful!! Thank you for sharing your unusual techniques to create them. What fun you must have had.

Micki said...

Both postcards are wonderful but I too like the red one best.

bookwraps by suz.com said...

love these techniques!!! thanks for sharing...

Dianne said...

They are both beautiful, I too really love the red one.. But then the feather one is very unique..

Barbara said...

I love them both! Your different layers are interesting! I like working with various technics!

Gypsy Purple said...

This was really interesting...thanks for the tutorial as well

Nola said...

Both are delicious, and so different! The Angelina one reminded me of the peacock's tail. But the red one just called my name. So rich in colour.

Carol said...

Thank you ladies. I have painted some gold ones and a lovely blue as well and I was thinking of covering one of my sketchbooks with it - we shall see.