Cotton meadow

Today’s post is a bit of a departure from card and ink but not so much as you would think. Although the project is made entirely from fabric and uses some sewing techniques, it’s still essentially a die cutting venture…..with the help of a little magic!-Terial Magic, a product that transforms fabric to enable intricate die cutting without additional stabilizer. Essentially it gives the fabric a temporary paper like quality. This means that it can be cut and printed on just like in our paper projects! This opens up a whole range of possibilities and although I have chosen to stick to fabric art, there is no reason why it cant be incorporated into paper-craft projects too.

Where to begin? I usually start by thinking about a colour palette. I draw a lot of inspiration from my patterned papers. Very often I will make a card just based on the colour of the paper. For today’s project I wanted a fresh summery look in pastel colours. I chose a pretty paper and gathered my materials around this palette.

Before putting together my scene some preparation was required. The terial magic was sprayed on to each of the selected fabric pieces.It had to be sprayed enough to saturate the fabric but not overly wet. Then the pieces were left to dry naturally. When almost dry and still a little damp, the pieces were dry ironed.This stiffened the fabric ready for cutting.

Next I created the background. I decided to use a felting technique with coloured wool and my felting machine to make the sky.I cut a piece of calico and some blue felt and roughly layered the sky colours diagonally across the fabric. The felting machine used a number of needles to merge the fibres together. I used white for the clouds and tried to pick some sun set colours…sort off.

For the foreground I cut some treated fabric and felt in the shape of hills and mountains. Some were die cut using tattered lace dies and some were cut freehand.I layered these up.I also added some extra wool between the layers and felted again.

To keep the layers in place I sewed them in place using a zig zag stitch on my sewing machine. I then over locked around the edges in pink thread to keep it all in place.

Next the die cutting. More Tattered lace dies- this time meadow shapes and some interesting swirl shapes and matching small flowers.

I set the foliage die cuts against the background and appliqued these to the project.

The next stage was to create the roses and butterflies, again from Tattered Lace. I also at this stage printed a couple of patterns on to a plain piece of treated fabric. Below shows how the flowers were made. I ensured that some were rolled more tightly than others to create different sizes for interest. I also used a variety of colours.

The butterflies were very fine. I have to confess a few butterflies had to die in the making of this project.. (fabric). I tried a number of different lay outs for the flowers. I tried to balance the colours without interfering with the scene. It wasn’t easy! The elements were stuck down using tacky glue.