A free creative morning….

Yesterday morning I set 3 hours aside for creative ventures and I was scared stiff!!

WHY is that such a scary proposition??

I knew the project that I wanted to play with, but it is something that I have never tried before and that scares me to death!!!

It shouldn’t but it sure does!!

OKAY….here is the project!!

During COVID days, one of our guild members (Sharon) took an online course from Michelle Mischkulnig of Chelle Textiles. In that class, she created this amazing threadwork scarf…..

I fell in love with it and immediately got onto the website and started reading about her process. She uses a water-soluble Vilene as the base for all of the stitching. The Vilene is sticky on one side, so the idea is to place lots of threads, yarns, and embellishments on the sticky side of the Vilene and then place another piece over the top, sticking the two stabilizers together with all of the bits in the middle. Then you quilt like mad to connect all of the bits and pieces. When the stabilizer is washed out, it leaves a lovely lacy scarf.

Now, I didn’t really want to make a scarf but I loved the idea of using this technique.

THE INSPIRATION…….Back in April, I posted this photo of a Botero painting and said that I found it inspiring…..

…but could I use this new technique to make some similar??

My first decision was to not work directly on the Vilene but to use a piece of dyed cheesecloth as my base. I was originally thinking about a green background for the bottom but found a piece that was already dyed brown and decided to just use it…..

I adhered the stabilizer to one side of the cheesecloth…..

My first plan was to cover this piece of cheesecloth with lots of threads and other bits…..

…but I quickly realized that I wanted to STITCH these on and not just lay them down. So I sat down to stitch.

But then I got worried and decided that I needed to make a test piece first. So I prepared a smaller piece and started stitching…..

….only to find out that the fabric bunched up a lot with the stitching.

I added a 2nd piece of stabilizer to the back and that made all the difference….

With the big piece double stabilized, it was time to start some stitching, and MAN was it fun…..

I started with a variegated green thread and put the pedal down and FLEW across the piece. It was so freeing to stitch with such abandon!!

I did have to stop once when my needle got gunked up with the adhesive, but a quick clean with an alcohol wipe solved that problem….

At the end of my scary creative time, I had this to show……

Where am I going next with this?

THAT question makes my head hurt!!

Come back for more and, if you have suggestions, PLEASE pass them on!!