Tuesday, September 14, 2010

crayon paper the end, maybe?

The second paper is finished! Embroidery, beads, buttons... 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!

crayon Paper In Continuance

("in continuance" ? Is that actual English?...)

Well, anyway, my fascination with these crayon papers continues. After having finished the first one (see the post below) I got back out my cray-pas and oil/water pastels and went over my other three papers that I configured from the rest of the paper bag. 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 ...