Gold purse

First of all I must thank Debbi for her two beautiful postcards - so much thought and work in them. They complement my present project on the Ancient Egyptians and I will be adding them to the project when I give a talk about it later in the year. She also sent me a piece of hand made paper - she thinks came from Thailand - which has hieroglyphics printed on it. I intend to use it in another piece for the project but not sure how as yet. Watch this space Debbi. She posted them on the Monday in Australia and they arrived through my letterbox on Thursday morning. I was amazed - only 3 days. I wish our internal post was so quick.


Well my GS is back at school, the Easter break over, so I can now do some work during the day. There is no substitute for daylight when working with colour.
Spent yesterday preparing for a string of new pieces most of which are stemming from ideas which I am not sure will work as yet so it is go with the flow and fingers crossed.

I have made a stencil for some screen printing thanks to Lynda. It is now ready to mount and then to test!!
I have coated some sheer fabric with InkAID ready to print out a digital image I created in Photoshop.
I have soaked several pieces of silk in Bubble Jet liquid ready for some more printing of digital images.
I have applied some walnut ink to some thin beige felt ready to do some machining of text and then to weave the text strips together.

I have also made a very large birthday card for my son-in-laws 40th - large card, big 40 - which is exactly what it is - a very big 40 on its own on the front.

Sooooo, now to do all the 'ready for's' and hope they all turn out as I am hoping they will.

Now to post the finished piece I mentioned on the last post. It is a gold purse.
I used the pyramid shape and the lotus flower as the design source, gold lame fabric for the body of the purse and white satin for the lining. I ironed a soft iron on Vilene to the back of the fabric before cutting it out. Here is where I made a mistake. I cut the shapes out with scissors and only at the end did I remember that I should have cut the gold lame using a soldering iron to seal the gold threads which fray very easily even with the Vilene on the back. (So many things to remember when using so many different materials and techniques).

Once the shapes were cut I used a gold thread and a lotus flower machine pattern stitch to stitch rows of lotus flowers across the gold lame.















I left the surface of the flap clear and created a padded gold leather lotus flower. It is surprising how many different golds there are and so I couldn't use my favourite gold leather because it was the 'wrong' gold colour. At least it made me use some of my other gold leather stock. The petals were outlined with a couched Japanese gold thread.

The lining was cut and the two pieces were satin stitched together with gold thread.
I made two tassels - one to hang from the flap and the other to hang from the bottom point of the purse.


I used a piece of gold braid for the handle.

A quick and simple evening purse.



I have also made a pyramid bag - not quite so easy to make - and will post that next time.