Playing with Fabric Scraps
Hello again. I know its been a long time since I’ve posted and I sincerely thank everyone who has contributed to the blog in my place. I definitely feel it has enriched our community and broadened our scope.
Because of health issues in our family, I haven’t been doing much creative work. But managed to do a little fabric manipulation with fabric scraps. I had bought a book a long time ago by Ann Small, Layered Cloth, The Art of Fabric Manipulation. Anyone who knows me or followed me knows I love texture. I was intrigued. Plus it was something I could work on a little at a time.
Like everyone else, I collect all things fiber and found a stash of five fabric pieces I had bought at a thrift store. Perfect, but I needed one more for six layers. No problem. I had an old Egyptian cotton sheet laying around I had used several years ago to make small pillowcases.
I wasn’t too concerned with colors, but it worked out fairly well. I cut five inch squares out of each cloth. They are different weights of cotton and or blends.
My first sandwich. Excuse the shadows the light wasn’t very good.
The book gives many examples of patterns. I was really excited to experiment. I started in the middle and using the width of the presser foot to make the next row.
I assembled a variety of tools, not knowing which would work best going through five layers.
The blue scissors proved to be most useful on most of them. Although my hands were not happy with me.
If you look closely at the pic above on the right, you’ll notice how stringy the one corner is. This is because it was cut on the grain.
For the next five sandwiches I alternated fabrics and designs.
After stitching and cutting, I roughed up the samples to get them to open up.
After being washed and dried.
The circular design was difficult to cut through the layers. I had to use the seam ripper to open it up far enough to get the scissors in and hope I’d get through the first five layers and not cut all six. The finished piece is very thready even after washing twice, dried in the dryer.
On the following one I decided to slash squares. So I used a piece of stitch and tear to draw my pattern then stitched it to the sandwich and followed the square pattern. Again I had to use the seam ripper to get started.
After stitching, slashing, washing twice and drying, here is the result. I found it interesting that not all squares opened, but every other row did creating it’s own pattern.
Here are all six of them together after they were washed, dried and trimmed.
I have to say the pink is my least favorite, but it was a fun project to see how different each pattern turned out. I’m sure using different fabrics and perhaps even using a tie dye type fabric you can get some really fun outcomes. Have you ever tried this?
I’m not sure what I’ll do with them now. Any suggestions?