sketchbook

I am off to Festival of Quilts in Birmingham on Thursday so thought it was time to replace the inside of my sketchbook again, this will be its fourth refill and goes everywhere with me,
I have made a lot of books since, but this is the one that gets thrown in my bag as its lightweight and takes all the rough and tumble it gets along side the rest of the paraphernalia I carry with me.



It started life when I was doing Maggie Greys machine embroidery online course, unfortunately life got in the way and I couldn't continue.
It was one of those surfaces that keeps going wrong and just gets more thrown at it.



The silk below was the base fabric, yuck, so it was covered with painted bondaweb and chiffon, stamped with gold paint, heavily stitched with metallic thread, yuck again, so lots of Markal rubbed over the surface, more chiffon, more stitch and zapped with the heat gun, then around the stitched design with a soldering iron.
the inner is just pelmet vilene which keeps it lightweight and durable.
the ties are just torn chiffon over stitched and tomato puree tube cut to make the wraps at the end. I stitched them on near the top at the back and they slide on easily to keep the book closed.
It is in a pretty sorry state and must be filthy, do I need to make a new one ?

Creating a fabric

You know all those kitchen roll squares that you have hanging around either from being used underneath fabric or lutradur, to catch the drips, or mopping up dyes, well I decided to use some up, first, I split the dried kitchen roll to one layer, although I have also found some very cheap roll of only one layer, the two here are coloured with walnut ink and black Parker ink, but it looks blue? to give it some body I ironed both of these sheets to medium weight iron on interfacing,

On the other side I ironed on some bondaweb (wunder-under) I then ironed gold foil on the walnut ink sheet and silver foil onto the blue. picture below

The next layer I was going to put chiffon on both of them (there is enough bondaweb to catch the chiffon on top of the foil) but when I tried a layer of purple crystal organza over the silver it looked lovely, I wish you could see how the colour changes as you move the fabric, one way silver one way purple.
To cover the gold foil I used a turquoise nylon scarf, and the colour looks like old metal covered with a patina of green, once again this changes as it moves

the two below are some more samples of the same technique


To see what can be made from this 'fabric' take a look here in Gallery One,
These little holders for special photographs, were inspired by Terri's Business Card Case in the free projects on Fibre and Stitch

Now go and check out Fibre in-Form
a new venture for Lynda (Purple Missus)and I, this is just the start of something we hope will grow into an exciting journey for all of us