Mar 26 14

Trying Out a New Product

Sometimes I’ll want to make something out of fabric but I’ll really want the end product to have more body and  more stiffness than fabric plus batting will provide.  A friend suggested I try a new product (which will go un-named for now) that has properties of both.  Just like fabric, it can be dyed, painted, stamped, silk-screened, embroidered, quilted, washed in the washing machine, etc, etc etc, but it has just a bit of stiffness  to it so it can hold a shape better than fabric layered with batting.  I kept my initial experiment simple and merely dyed it.  My first experiment was to embroider a hyperquilted feathered wreath onto it, using a piece of scrap batting behind it as a trapunto layer.  Here’s how that came out:
NP2
 
…and I deliberately quilted this motif  at the far end of my piece because my goal is to create a quilted envelope that I can use later to store stitch outs of digitized motifs.  The way I’ve situated this trapuntoed motif, the feathered wreath will take up most of the front of the envelope.   This next shot illustrates what I mean:
 
NP1
 
It’s hard to see the 3-dimensional nature of the wreath, but it really does have a nice bit of “poof” to it.  If you look closely, you might be able to see the line of invisible thread that goes just outside the wreath:
 
NP3
I stitched a swirl motif as my background fill design.  Since the material was dyed in various shades of green and turquoise, I used the color “Grass” in YLI Variations Thread.  I love this line of thread and am very bummed out that YLI has discontinued it.  Here’s an early shot of it as I was just beginning to add some background quilting:
 
NP4
When I’m working on a background like this, where the background is really a melange of related colors, I find it really helps to use a subtly variegated thread like this one.  I say that because a solid green thread would kind of “deaden” the wonderful feel of this variegated background color, and a variegated thread like this one really enhances the variegation.  Here’s a shot of more of it quilted:
 
NP-5.5
…and here is a shot of the whole piece quilted:
 
NP-7
 
 Next, I folded it into my envelope shape and stitched the two sides down.  I did this with my seams on the outside.  This was my first time of stitching my binding down completely on the sewing machine and I have to say that the speed of getting it done was nice.  I’m still not in a place where I’d do this on a  “real quilt,” (I enjoy the handwork of sewing that binding down by hand), but it was great for a project like this one.  Here’s a shot of it all bound:
 
 
 
NP8
 
 
Because I made my wreath so large, I didn’t have a whole lot of room left over for the flap of my envelope, but again, this is kind of an experimental piece for me so it’s not a big deal.  I kind of made this envelope on the fly, so I didn’t think through issues like enclosures ahead of time.  I wasn’t sure how to “seal” the envelope and because I’d left such a narrow fold over flap, I didn’t have many options.  I ended up settling on Velcro mini-dots:
velcro-mini-dots
And here is the finished envelope:
 
NP-finished
 
I have to say that this was a total pleasure to make!  It has the stiffness/sturdiness I wanted from a functional standpoint, but still retains all the beauty of quilted fabric.  The trapunto on the wreath also lends a great 3-D texture.  The colors on this next shot aren’t great, but it gives you a better sense of the wonderful texture of this material:
 

NP-finsihed-texture

 
 
This was a really fun little project to make and for some reason, this was especially fun to quilt.  This is a nice little background fill to play with:
 
NP-quilting
 
Can’t wait for the next “experiment!”

2 Comments

  1. Accroquilt Says:

    Beautiful! I will give a try to this background motif in quilting. Thanks to share with us! Have a nice day!

  2. Michele Hester Says:

    The texture of the “fabric” looks like a heavy duty interfacing…….