BLOG 409

BLOG 409

I am really happy to be able to say that I am a lot better this week and being the generous soul that I am, I have passed the cold on to my husband! He is getting better day by day and we will soon both be back to as normal as it gets around here! Feeling brighter meant that I was chomping at the bit to start a creative piece but then we had to go to Scotland to attend the funeral for one of our Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati) friends. Emily was married to Bob and, like us, they got married out in Tarawa. She died of cancer last week and the funeral was a wonderful celebration of her life with the men wearing Hawaiian shirts and the women in bright dresses. Her granddaughters performed an island dance which she had taught them and it was a colourful and sensitive send-off. It’s the way to go!

Back home, I have started to dig out my ‘painterly’ fabrics, many of which are left over from earlier projects. They already have a fusible ironed onto the WS and they have been cut into lines or squares with a fluted or pinked rotary cutter to give an uneven edge. It made my mouth water to see them which is a good start!

             Palette

 

 

I decided to ‘play’ first, just to allow myself to enjoy finding my way again with this method that I developed many years ago. This takes off any pressure to complete a proper finished piece! For inspiration, I chose one of my collection of greetings cards and isolated a terracotta tub festooned with flowers.

                Inspiration

 

 

 I started with the colours for the terracotta pot and isolated them on a tray. I drew the pot roughly with pencil on a sheet of ‘release paper’ from Bondaweb. The ready-fused fabric pieces will only stick to this paper for as long as you are working and then you can peal it off in its entirety when it is complete.  My work station includes the palette, the drawn shape and an iron.

             Palette for the pot

 

             Working station

 

 

Then I get ‘painting’ by overlapping my fabric shapes, just enough so that they will stick together when touched with the toe of the iron. Here is the sequence and you will be able to see straight away that I have deviated from the original picture; everything is dependent on what fabrics you have available. This is the story so far.

 

           Step 1

 

            Step 2

 

          Step 3

 

              Step 4

 

              Step 5

 

             Step 6

 

               Step 7