Sunday 5 February 2012

Embellishing Day Out

Well Happy Bloggers,

At last we have our broadband sorted and can resume blogging. And what else is there to do on this cold, snowy Sunday?  Well plenty, but my preferred choice is stay in the warm. This is my street, early this afternoon.

Some brave souls have ventured out, and I have even had junk mail delivered today. But onto more interesting things.



Yesterday, I attended an Embellishing workshop ran by Pauline Verinder at Cottenham. And a very enjoyable day it was too. One of the ladies in my sewing  group, kindly organised the whole thing, and we went by minibus. It was a bitterly cold day, so we were glad to be in a lovely spacious and warm room. And here are some of my samples.


We started by laying out fibres, wool in this case and blending colours together and then embellishing on a machine to hold it all together. This piece was later used to cut out shapes and applique them onto another background, which I am not showing here because I don't like it.

We only used our embellishing machines, no other method was used although obviously, you add stitching, beading etc. if you wish to later.

Our second piece involved wrapping a frame, laying fibres over the top and then embellishing to hold together.  You can use anything for this, yarns or fabric and you don't have to wrap a frame, you could just lay the materials down and embellish. But you would then have to bear in mind that the materials would move about a bit. Or even a lot.



Next we incorporated shirring elastic as our base and embellished over the top, using yarns and fabric strips.  I have used muslin and a very hairy yarn for this sample. It was rather too lacy for my taste, but only because I could see too much of the shirring elastic, so you will see on the reverse, that I have added some chiffon.


So there we have it, if anyone out there has indulged in some embellishing - that's needle or dry felting, if you are not familiar with the term - I would love to hear from you and see your work, so please get in touch.

 Happy creating.

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