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.

Rosehips - embroidery on sheer fabrics

This piece, called Rosehips, is my response to a workshop led by Vinny Stapely. She encouraged us to pick a wild flower or plant, make a drawing to get a simple outline and then cut it out of 3 different sheer fabrics and, after stitching it down, embellish with embroidery. She showed us some beautiful pieces of her own work, which were all on sheer fabrics.

I have been working on this since early October, where I kept seeing wild rosehips on my local walks so I decided to chose them for my plant subject. In addition, I had seen an piece of work with a ploughed field as the background and couldn't get this out of my mind so went with that composition.

I started with drawing out my rose stems and placing on collected rose leaves and hips to work out the scale of my composition.

I saw that I could make the leaves life-sized as I had picked the smaller sprigs of leaves so I set about printing from them onto different colours of organza and also straight onto Bondaweb using different shades of green acrylic paint. I painted the back of the leaf on a spare scrap of fabric, used a printing roller to press the leaf down onto the organza and then used a wet wipe to clean up the excess paint.

I had extra green paint left over so used that to paint some random marks which could look like grass, again onto different shades of green organza and chiffon. At this point I wasn't sure if I would use these in this project but it is good to experiment and I keep all these painted pieces and they might be useful in a future project if not.

Next I mixed up some brown acrylic paint and painted my ploughed field background straight onto Bondaweb, which gives quite a subtle effect when dry. I left this to dry on the backing paper before cutting it to shape using my original drawing as a template.

Then it was time to start constructing the background. Vinny had shown us a piece with a border of sheer fabric around the edge, which I thought looked beautiful so I cut a larger square of net curtain for the backing of my piece. I did use some spray starch on it to give it a bit more structure. Then I set a smaller square of muslin on top and attached to the net with a running stitch all around. I cut a piece of pale blue chiffon for the sky and attached that with a small running stich all around, before ironing down the painted 'field' Bondaweb.

I felt that the field needed more definition, so decided to add and overlay of gold organza plus some strips of gold dressmaking lace, which kind of looked like crop stubble. These were attached with rows of irregular running stitch. I was conscious of Vinny's advice to plan your background carefully as any stitching will show through against the light. I added some cloud shapes in blue organza to the sky to break it up a bit.

Finally I added torn pieces of the wet wipe mop up cloth as trees on the horizon line and layered up the painted grasses strips in the foreground. To attach the latter I used repositionable spray glue, as suggested by Vinny. I have never used this product before but it worked reasonably well.

Then it was onto the rose stems. I used quilting cotton backed with Bondaweb and traced off all the shapes from my original drawing. I remembered to number all the pieces and my drawing so that I could re-assemble the twiggy jigsaw on the backing again. When I was happy with the positioning of them all I ironed them down. I cut out the printed leaves and began experimenting with where to place them. I settled on the arrangement in the photo above. All the leaves on top of the field section could just be ironed down as the Bondaweb already covering the field was strong enough to come through the organza overlay and grip the leaves. The ones at the top and bottom had to have a small oval of Bondaweb put underneath to hold them down. This was essential as these fabrics fray very easily and that wasn't the look I was going for!

Next I backed some red satin with Bondaweb and cut out the rosehips and positioned them onto the piece, before ironing down. After that all I had to do was complete the embroidery of the detail. I started with backstitching the main leaf stems using 3 strands of floss in backstitch. Then I moved onto the leaf veins. This took a long time as I had to ensure that the stitches followed the line of the stitching on the back and the front otherwise when you hold it up to the light you would be able to see confusing 'jumps' between stitches, which would spoil the effect. I used a single strand of floss for the veins.

I finished by adding small twig details with 2 strands of brown floss in backstitch, details on the ends of the rosehips using a single strand of black floss and a small row of backstitch in red silk thread on the 'belly' of the rosehips. For the detail on the ends of the rosehips I used the technique taught to us by Emily Tull to curve a long straight stitch by adding a small stab stitch across the stitch at the point you want it to bend.

Here is the finished piece taped to the window to show it with the light through it. I am pleased with the overall result. The main area that could have been improved is taking the field part all the way to the bottom of the piece to avoid the hard line across the foreground. I could have disguised this with a semblance of a fence behind or in front of the rose stems in the foreground but I already feel I have spent enough time on this piece so will leave it for now.