Next we flipped the drawing onto polyester satin and ironed to transfer the colors with all of the prerequisite parchment paper protecting the iron and the board. A fussy process, but after a few tries the part about keeping the drawing from shifting and creating a kind of shadow effect got easier.
This clever artist then cut her picture square from the fabric...
...(you can't really see this) and layered the fabric picture on the top with some WonderUnder fusible web to a square of felt underneath for stability.
The ironing champion at work:
And the results! That is my flower in the lower right. I have just started to hand stitch it, working along the lines to embellish the drawing. I can't wait to see how the anime girls look with stitching.
And here is what happened when I scraped the inside of a cereal box.
They come from holding the scraping card at a very low angle while running across the page.
So take the paint onto the card in a thin layer an inch (5cm) or so up from the bottom (not just on the edge)
and lay the card down pretty low to the paper as you scrape across. It makes the paint skip in bubbles and bursts across the page and the bottom edge is not pressed so fully down as to homoginize the line of paint.
Cool, eh?
Examples from other papers.
Michelle has loads of links on her blog to see more scraped paint examples.
But I couldn't quite stick to that and used a running stitch (hmm .. not entirely satisfied there)
After I decided that I had put enough embroidery on the piece I got to thinking about the question How much is too much? Or: how does one know when one is done? I had an artist in the studio this summer asking the same question. She was having so much fun that I thought her answer was probably "whenever you want to stop", or "whenever you have to give the piece back to its owner" (there was a schedule for this costume).
and here:
Do you want to know how I got the triangles and ovals to exactly match the stitched spaces?(this seemed vaguely brilliant and terribly fussy to me: I laid a piece of white tissue paper on top and traced and labeled each triangle, each little space. When I had cut them out I could put them on the section of painted paper that I wanted(either the dark blue parts or the white dotted parts) and set them in their proper places awaiting some gel medium for gluing. I glued and weighted all of the parts overnight to make sure that the corners stuck. It worked.
And here too: (very top and very bottom).jpg)
And so, to date, the layers and stages of ornamentation include: 
Looks sooo cool on the back to me. Now I am in the hand stitching stage. I don't think that I am going to be able to hold back. This is gonna get encrusted with a whole lot of stitches and color and texture. Beads probably too. I mean it. I can't help myself.
Yeah, yeah: that's a grocery bag there. You can see the printing on the back. The texture, the "hand" of the piece is so marvellous. 
Chain stitch on the left and blanket stitch on the right. Then an odd little feather stitch in the upper right.
Green herringbone, red and pink French knots, red cross stitches and green and lavender closed feather stitches. I loved working on this paper. My hands felt a little waxy as I worked, but I liked the finished weight and texture a lot. I like the muted and blended colors very much.
I had a girl in the Studio this AM (the homeschoolers Tuesday morning group) who was curious about what I was doing so gave it a try. Look at her luscious eye. Great!
I added more color and lines here and there.
I ironed again, but not so much as before. The ironing seems to take away a lot of the color. Of course it also melts the color right into the paper... so I guess that that is just a decision that we make. I got very interesting top sheets out of the ironing though:
And here are my crumpled and then flattened papers. You'll see the paper in the middle is kind-of shiny. Jill - oh! I forgot to tell you: the author of the article in Quilting Arts magazine is Jill A. Kennedy. Anyway, Jill instructed to iron interfacing to the back of the papers - which I didn't do as I thought that the brown paper was pretty sturdy by itself, though you will see that I did back the papers with some acrylic felt when I started to stitch. Jill also instructed to iron WonderUnder onto the front of the paper. I am not sure why. I am thinking that it helps to adhere embellishments later on (basting isn't so possible on paper, leaving holes and all). So the fusible web leaves the paper shiny. I only fused one of the pieces. I haven't started hand embroidering that piece yet, so I don't know if it will warm in my hands and be sticky??? I will let you know.
Here is some early machine stitching. As I did not bond the felt to the paper I had to take this beginning stitching slowly, working from the center out, so that I didn't get wrinkles.
Then I started working in the fancier free machine stitching: (and you can see did not center the white felt evenly and had to snip the paper to even things out a bit.
Here: some machine stitch patterns (yellow) mixed with free stitching (red):
More free stitching:
More of both kinds of stitching: I love how this looks.
It has taken me all day to get this written. I started before breakfast, but had to stop due to a crashing lightning storm, it lessened, I wrote, I had to go to the studio, I stopped ...
Well the cray-pas and especially the water/oil pastels are such a dream to lay down color with.
Then I sprayed again with my watered acrylic ... and rubbed it in with a paper towel.
See? See? Nice rich colors with that muting of the blue.
Like a goof I ironed it under freezer - not parchment - paper. (It all stuck together.) And it also came off on the freezer paper - so I am going to stitch on that too. Later.
Then I machine stitched it onto a backing of acrylic felt:
Drew gold dots and then hand stitched. I like it.
So tomorrow I will go back to the original crayon paper (see the post below) and draw/spray/stitch into that.
Really, very nice texture and muting/blending softening of color, yeah?
Well, I am hale and hearty. I visited with a homeopath about the headaches and am having some very wierd dreams on the Constitutional, as well as a bit of luck staving off the sad behavior that begets the headaches. (See the entry below for why in the world I am chatting about my head health.)
And I got out my box of colors:
Posts
All Comments
