Tag: sheer fabrics

Good news

Good news if you’re in the US.

Royal Mail is now providing an international mail service that replaces the flat fee for US customers and instead charges the 10% tariff at the point of posting. What that means is that all charges and fees are paid up front before your parcel leaves the UK, leaving you nothing further to pay when your parcel is delivered. It also ensures that your parcel clears customs as smoothly as possible. Definitely no $80 fee.

Unfortunately I’ve had to increase the postage costs for US customers, to help cover the cost of the tariff as well as the administration fee that Royal Mail charges for providing the service.

There may be some delays to begin with, until the system becomes familiar and runs more smoothly, so you may want to wait a few weeks or so before placing an order – but you definitely can order again if you want to, and hurrah for that.

In other news, I’m preparing some new sheer fabric collections and have been painting some lovely chiffon and tulle fabrics.

painted chiffon
patterned tulle, painted and drying

I have some sheer silk fabrics to dye next week and then I’ll have some fun curating an inspirational collection for you.

We’re in for a wet and windy weekend here in the UK, so a comfy chair, a hot chocolate, and a good book may well be on the menu. And some quiet stitching, of course.

3rd October, daily stitching

Paint-dyeing

I paint-dyed some chiffon fabric this week.

paint-dyed chiffon

It’s the same technique demonstrated in my Stitch a Little Landscape course, very easy and very effective. Any fabric paints will work; acrylic inks will work too.

If you let the fabric partly dry while it’s scrunched up, you get these really attractive watermark effects where the colour settles into the creases:

paint-dyed chiffon
paint-dyed chiffon
nice

An unexpected extra – I laid the fabric strips to dry on some packaging paper and now I have free collage paper too:

packaging paper accidentally paint-dyed

Some of the chiffon will end up in sheer fabric scrap packs next month. I’m pretty pleased with these, which is always a good way to end the working week.

Have a lovely weekend.

Tabula Rasa

I started some new work. It was a bit of a surprise; I didn’t see it coming.

Tabula Rasa, in progress

Sometimes it just happens that way. Your hands know what they need to do and the brain is a bit slow to catch up.

Tabula Rasa, layered stitches

It’s partly inspired by these words, by Pierre Janet:

“Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.”

Tabula Rasa, in progress

It will be rolled up on a wooden bobbin, eventually, as a life that unfurls.

Much of the stitching is beneath the surface but still visible through the translucent layers.

Tabula Rasa, stitches beneath silk chiffon
Tabula Rasa, buried threads and stitches

At this point I don’t want to say too much more about it. For now, I’m listening to what it has to say and thinking about where it might be going.

Tabula Rasa, in progress

Scraps

This week I’m in the scraps box as I start compiling my new forthcoming course on making stitched samples for sketchbooks. New courses take a while to create, but I do enjoy making them.

fabric scraps

However much I take out of the scraps box, it never seems to get any emptier. It always reminds me of the fairy tale about a magic porridge pot that keeps refilling itself. Not complaining, but I do wonder where they all keep coming from.

I like to use lots of layers in my stitched samples. I think of them as transparent layers of time.

stitched samples in progress

The one below is made from scraps of antique and modern lace covered with two layers of very fine tulle, with some textured cotton yarns couched onto the surface.

whites

I’ve also been painting some lovely patterned tulles:

painted tulle

Fibre reactive dyes won’t work on synthetics, but fabric paints do. I use Jacquard Dye-Na-Flow, which are very liquid and behave more like dye than paint. My Stitch a Little Landscape course has a section on painting fabrics this way. You could even use standard watercolours, if you don’t need them to be washable.

At some point it will all come together nicely.

layered stitched scraps ready to become something useful

Immersion

This piece takes its title from Wordsworth’s 1804 poem ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’:

‘Strength in what remains’, 15″ square

It hasn’t photographed well on this very dark wet Wednesday; the colours and layers are a little more subtle in real life.

Strength in what remains, details

The text fabric (above, top left) is a handwritten page from a nineteenth-century almanac that I scanned and printed onto tea-dyed cotton. If you iron fabric to a piece of freezer paper that exactly fits your printer (usually A4 in the UK), it’s surprisingly straightforward. I expected it to get snarled up and jammed in the bowels of the printer but it sailed through quite smoothly. I used to print on fabric quite often and had forgotten how effective it can be. If you set it with a hot (ish) iron after printing it appears to be reasonably water resistant, though I haven’t yet tried washing it.

Strength in what remains, detail of hand stitch and layered sheers

There are a couple more like this in progress, an ‘Intimations of Immortality’ mini-series, perhaps.

‘Something that is gone’ in progress

There’s also a heap of loveliness on the table that will be turned into something a little larger…

fabric and thread waiting for action

…related to more sketchbook exploration:

big plans

I am definitely busy.