Week One

(See Sept. 14th for details about the 52 projects. Click on photos to enlarge them.)

Week one.
Fabric painted pellon is versatile, easy, and satisfying! I started this particular piece with metallic paints, blue and red, followed with washes of more blue, yellow and a little black. Paint bleeds through pellon and often I find that what might be the backside ends up being the side I use. This piece is 4x6 inches and I did use the painted side for the background with the focal piece, a funny little abstract shape that is black edge stitched, taken from the flip side.

The embellishments are fabric beads leftover from an exchange I joined. The black fabric beads were painted with dabs of metallic paint, blue, gold, and bronze and wrapped with metallic thread before being attached to the piece with decorative ribbon. The other beads are a metallic fabric that is miserable to wrap around the straws; I dabbed a little gold paint on them for added texture. (Note: The beads that didn’t slide off of the straws when the glue dried were cut to size.)
Before satin stitch edging the piece I backed it with white canvas fabric.

I have a feeling that this piece might have been too serious if the abstract hadn’t been edged with a decorative machine stitch. Presently, the decorative stitches on my new Janome are a novelty that will probably fade in time.

Quote:
“I learned that you should feel when writing (or creating anything!), not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”Brenda Ueland