Experimenting with tissue paper

This project started out as book making with Anne Kelly but ended up in a very different place - with clothing made from fabric printed with my own design!

Anne Kelly invited us to make a concertina book using a thin backing fabric with memorabilia pasted down using watered down PVA and then laminated on top with thin white tissue paper. This could then be stitched into, either by hand or with machine embroidery, and hand coloured with Inktense pencils. The suggestion was to make a book about a trip we had made. At the time I had no working printer so decided to test the concept by making a book about my garden.

I chose images from seed packets and gardening magazines and stuck them down onto some thin curtain lining. I used builder's PVA watered down 50:50 with cold water. You had to make sure that you did this on a well protected surface with a plastic covering. I laminated this with white tissue paper, being careful to smooth out any bubbles and creases with a wide pasting brush. The tissue paper is very fragile when wet so you can only smooth so far before it breaks!

Using a hairdryer to speed up drying time, I dried it off thoroughly and was left with the following curling, slightly cloudy result.

This is then ironed flat with a hot iron, using baking paper to protect the iron. The concertina folds are then ironed back in. At this point you can stitch round items or hand colour them to pick out and highlight certain details, or add additional lines, patterns or stitch images to link the images together. 

The surface this process produces is very pleasing - almost feels like vellum - and because of the PVA I think it would be very durable. I had a go at hand colouring the butterfly image with Inktense pencils, which was very successful. However, I wasn't after a colouring book activity and the cloudy images were not inspiring me to stitch it.

What was happening on the back did inspire me. Because I had lots of diluted PVA left over I experimented with covering the back with paper tissue flowers.

This was the result - I quite liked how the green tissue leaves bled into the surrounding fabric. Some of my stitching friends were very positive about the look of these flowers and said they would like a scarf printed with them. Which led to me cut out strips of all the colours of tissue paper I had to see which colours bled.

I really liked the overall look of this which led me to make a collage of tissue paper strips glued down onto thin fabric - I really like bright colourful patterns!

I love how the tissue paper overlaps and makes new colours. This doesn't have the white tissue lamination layer over the top but was ironed flat when dry. 

As this is a stitch challenge I added black free machining around each of the tissue shapes with blach thread to make a very graphic design. I was thrilled with this and uploaded the photo to bagsoflove.co.uk to have it printed and made up onto a neck tube and polar fleece neck warmer. I was amazed and delighted by the final product - the printed pieces really show the original surface of the tissue paper and the areas of overlap etc. It feels very special to wear something you have designed yourself!

I then had a request to make one in a less crazy colour way so made a blue/black/purple/silver piece with navy blue stitching and had it made up into a fleece neck warmer in the same way.

Finally, I experimented with a more considered design of flowers.

I pasted the flowers down with diluted PVA, this time on a coloured tissue paper background, on a backing of muslin.

I then stitched free-motion spirals in a variegated thread to emphasise the flowers and added leaf vein details with Inktense pencils.