Project 6 , Stage 3- Appliqueing

Stage 3 - Applied Fabric Techniques



 My first, tentative steps into applique.  I was almost a total novice, apart from some felt food I made for my sons' Christmas present, maybe I had a vague idea that applique was a bit twee, perhaps I had relegated it to the same drawer as cross stitching.  I have to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it and also by the range of results I was able to achieve with such a straightforward technique.

 I began gently, just experimenting with different fabrics and stitches to see which I enjoyed the most.  I based all of these experiments on some drawings of a pineapple from my sketchbook.

First of all I tried out cut-back applique, using the shapes and colours of my pineapple, layering a sheer orange polyester, orange wool felt, a green interweave and a green cotton.  I stitched hexagons through all of the layers and then cut out some or all of the upper layers to let the others show through.  The combination of colours isn't particularly pleasing to me but I do like the different textures showing through, especially where the orange sheer was cut back and the rough surface of the orange felt was exposed.

 As the course notes suggest I then moved on to trying out some reverse applique using different layers.  This was my first attempt at machine applique.  I like the effect of the zig zag stitch, it brings an added dimension to the piece that i think would've been missing if I'd used a straight stitch.  The majority of my machining up to this point has involved trying to stay in a straight line and it was quite a steep learning curve to start doing curved shapes, I was improving a bit toward the end of the exercise I think!  I also felt it was important to use a patterned fabric here, as I am prone to avoiding them.  In my opinion it works well in tying all the other greens together.

 Moving on to something a bit more creative and challenging I created a sheer envelope to house some pinappley coloured fragments and snippets and then topped it all by hand appliqueing a leather cut out pineapple 'scale' to the top with the idea that the  unattached snippets behind would create movement and texture.  I'm quite pleased with this one, I like the depth of it and I think it would work really well with many of these hexagons en masse stitched together to create a patchwork pineapple wall.  Next to it is my inital experiment with zapping acrylic felt with a heat gun to create interesting pineapple shaped distortions.

 My idea was to use the acrylic felt to make a layered grid over cotton and then to zap so that the exciting textures would emerge just like when I'd practised on the green felt above.  It would've been really awesome, I'm sure of it, I'm also sure that the green and orange felts both came out of the same packet......   So here it is - orange felt, diligently stitched to green cotton background with a very neat grid in preparation for the exciting warping and texturing that was going to occur.  What actually occurred was some slight singeing and a stench of burnt sheep throughout my house! - I now know that checking whether your felt is acrylic or wool before you start stitching it is the best idea, also that acrylic felt causes coughing and wheezing when you heat it up, two important lessons:)

 Moving on from the felt disaster I decided to try out the same approach using Tyvek in place of the felt.  Being fairly certain that it would work this time I took the time to stitch a hexagonal grid.  I painted the Tyvek with yellow and green silk paint and then , because I couldn't resist it, I scattered it with glitter.  There was also a layer of orange sheer between Tyvek and cotton but it mostly vanished under the glare of the heat gun.  I'm really pleased with the results this time round, partly due to the disaster that went before I'm sure.  I love the big texture and the big effect, but most of all I love the back of the piece which ended up looking like a crinkly patchwork, sadly I seem to have neglected to photograph that!

 I was still interested in the idea of making a sheer envelope with trapped fragments and the hexagonal grids suggested by my studies of the pineapple seemed to me to be a really interesting way to create sheer 'windows'.  Freehand machine stitching hexagons proved to be much harder than I'd imagined so some of them are more like squashed circles but I don't think that this matters too much.  I like the overall effect and think that its an interesting technique that offers many opportunities to explore it further.

When it came to my large applique sample I very nearly carried on working with the pineapple but by then I was running out of quite a lot of orange and green things!  I also contemplated working with the fabric collage of new season garlic from earlier in this project because I am crazy about the colour combinations in those garlic bulbs.  In the end I went with a sgraffito painting/scraping of a fishermans bucket of rope that came from a postcard sent to me by my mum from Greece.  Using an image created with the sgraffito technique seemed to me to offer so many textural possibilities I thought that it's be perfect for this stage. 

Working on to an old remnant of my Mums' calico curtains I machined down a black sheer and a dark blue metallic satin in strips.  Next I applied the bucket shape cut from some hessian with Bondaweb, this fabric provided the exact texture and structure that I was looking for but not the colour and so on top I hand stitched the coloured stripes of the bucket with sheers in the hope that the texture of the hessian would still show through.  I decided to leave the rough edges to create texture ion the picture and also to try and draw the eye away from the background which I wasn't terribly happy with.  The ropes inside the bucket were created by making a pocket from a really open weave scrim and stuffing it with lots of different neutral yarns from a texture sample pack.  I stitched it down here and there to create the lumps and bumps.  I believe that this is the most successful part of the applique, i am really pleased with hiw it works and how it echoes the rope like texture of the original painting.  The rest of the picture was completed by hand stitching felt shapes and some sheer to finish it off.  Overall I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, although I would very much like to start embroidering details on to it but I understand that that is not what this exercise is about so I will save that for another day!