3-13-13 - The Artsy-Fartsy Edition

I've been having fun playing the last couple of days, and I thought you might want to see my "art-fartsy" stuff.

Nevada Leaves
9 in. wide X by 18.25 in. tall

First, I finally finished my little leaf wall quilt!  You can see how this little quilt started on this post.  It actually came out a little bigger than I was aiming for, but it still fits in the space it's intended for, so it's all good.  I took this photo without flash, as it seemed to better show the dimensionality of the leaves (made from used and dyed dryer sheets) than with the flash.  The colors are pretty true-to-life on my screen.

Yesterday my friend Candy came over to help me play with some of the goodies that I bought at Sew Expo this year and last.  My favorite booth at Sew Expo seems to be Embellishment Village.  I think they have the best toys!  Candy watches me buy stuff there and I'm sure she wonders what the heck I'm doing with it.  Frankly, I hadn't really done much with it yet and it was time to remedy that!

So, we had fun playing with foiling and Paintstick rubbing. Here's the results of our play:

This is Candy's first attempt at foiling and we both learned some things!  The top right taught us to not apply the iron to a previously foiled area.  It removes the foiling!  The bottom right area showed us what happens when you put the foil stuff wrong-side down to the adhesive.  The upper left area came out pretty good.  There isn't complete coverage if you use Wonder Under, which I actually kind of like.  The little speckles are done with 007 Bonding Agent, which is a fusible that is granular, kind of like salt.  I LOVE what this does!

This is my first attempt at the fusible.  I also used Wonder Under.  Free-hand cut hearts, so they're wonky.  And more sparkly sprinkles!  You can see I was so anxious to get started that I didn't iron my fabric.  We used all hand-dyed fabric from my stash.

Here's a second shot of my piece.  (more wrinkles)  This foiling is so hard to photograph!

Here is a piece I did this morning.  I wanted to try the swirly print foil and use Heat 'n Bond.  I have 5 packages of Ultra Hold and 5 packages of Lite, but no "regular".  So this is the Ultra Hold.  I was afraid the Lite wouldn't stick well enough.  And more sprinkles!  I think I could put these sparkly sprinkles on everything and still love it!

Here's a closeup of the big spiral.  You can see the swirly print of the foil in this shot.

After the foiling, we tried doing some rubbings with oil paint sticks.

The fabric on the left has iridescent silver, the one on the right has opaque rose.  I used some texture plates intended for Fimo clay for these.  The pink one didn't work too well because that particular plate had multiple layers of texture, but the paint stick only got the highest layer.  But I think this will work well for a background piece.

Both of these have the iridescent gold paint stick.  I rubbed over rubber stamps on these pieces.  The design on the left kind of smeared because I rubbed the paint stick a little too vigorously.

The left fabric has iridescent gold, the right is Candy's and has opaque green and rose paint sticks.  We used some rubbing plates and rubber stamps for these.

Gold paint stick.  This is Fantasy Kanji, a rubber stamp I purchased at Embellishment Village (and this photo is actually sideways). Fantasy in this case means that it doesn't actually say anything, it just looks like Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) I think this one came out the best, and I have a plan for this one.

I used the video Surface Design Sampler Platter with Lyric Kinard as my source of information and inspiration..  It's available here as a digital download.  I recommend it!

p.s.  Happy "Pi Day" tomorrow! (3.14)