FIBER JUNKIES FEBRUARY MEETING

Our Fiber Junkies meeting day is always one I look forward to each month.

We have made paper-fabric several times and were eager to spend another day playing with paper napkins, tissue paper, and other assorted paper images. It's a simple process.....torn paper is placed onto a fabric base that is 'painted' with diluted white glue.  Another layer of glue is painted over the paper...and left to dry.  Ta-da.....the result is a sheet of rather stiff fabric backed paper that can be utilized in a variety of ways.  Here I've used a wavy rotary cutter to divide several larger sections into various shapes and sizes to decorate a blank note card and some gift tags.

 Denny was working with a 'time' theme...she's in the process of working from the center out....

Here's her completed piece.

Judy incorporated some garment pattern tissue paper into her design....loved that idea.

Kate's purposely designed hers with smaller pieces to achieve a finished product that looks just as great when cut into smaller sections.

This is mine......it ended up looking VERY Easter egg like.  In an effort to reduce the stiffness and bulk of the finished piece, I tried a new approach this time.  Instead of working on cotton fabric, I used 'soil separator cloth'.  I learned about this very thin, but strong plain white material from Judy. She gets it in the plumbing department at Home Depot.  I got mine at Lowe's....which is not the same.  The kind I bought has little dots on it......not very usuable for printing.  BUT...it worked great here..... a very good thing as I have a LOT of this stuff.

 Our show and tell was awesome......here's a edited look.  This is a scarf Denny created in a vat discharge dye workshop.  She was over the moon with this new approach. The technique involves discharging the color of fabric with a design and then replacing with a new color.  (Similar to working with DeColourant)

 And this is where it gets brilliant......she created her design using a wood burning tool - etched into a piece of insulation material (Styrofoam like)...what a great way to make a print block.

Here's Denny's sample piece, made while learning this vat discharge dye method. I'll be sure to share more about this (new to us)....technique when our group has time to explore it.