I have showed you two segments of the process of creating my “cityscape” for the third quarter challenge and had gotten to the point of adding needle felted windows and doors to my buildings. Now on to the free motion machine stitching.
I started with the doors and I did a few many times overlapping. This wasn’t a good start but instead of tearing it out, I decided to push forward and see if I could fix it as I went.
I finished stitching around all the windows and doors. I was still unhappy with the perspective and the doors on the left hand building were standing out too much.
So I added a slightly darker thread and stitched the slats across the buildings and then covered up a bit of the lighter threads where they seemed too prominent. As I said last week, it would have worked better if I had done the diagonal lines across the buildings before I added the windows and doors. The perspective would have ended up better. Perhaps I will remember that the next time I do something with buildings and perspective required.
Next up, I needed to put a bunch of stars in the night sky. I had some Bonash Bonding Powder already. It is a powdered form of fusible which melts when ironed. I borrowed some silver foil from my friend Paula. It’s like this stuff. I tried a sample on some nuno felt on the right. You have to put the shiny side up and then cover it with parchment paper and then iron for 5-10 seconds. Let it cool down, peel the foil paper off and magically you have stars!
On the left, you can see the powder sprinkled on to the nuno felt. Then the foil paper is put on top and ironed down. Let it cool and when you peel it off, your shapes will appear in silver foil. You can use any kind of fusible and even cut out shapes if you like. I used the powder so it would look like the milky way/starry sky.
And here’s the result. I think I might have gone a bit crazy with the stars but it does resemble the inspiration photo. Hopefully, everyone will be looking at the shiny, night sky and not notice how the perspective is off in the buildings. So I hope you enjoyed the saga of the “cityscape” challenge. I think I will put this one on a black background and call it “Garnet Night Sky”, after the ghost town it was based on.