New bag and a busy week

On Tuesday I decided to join the camera club - the one both my OH and daughter are members of. I went to the meeting and saw a presentation of underwater photography from an amateur diver. He dives all over the world and showed us some incredible photographs of sponges and corals with the most amazing colours. Lots of design source and he's local to me!!

My jewellery arrived back home today from the photographer so now I have to mount it all back onto the display boards and stands. Uggg - big job.

Gave a talk to a local embroidery group today so was able to refresh my memory of the Craster project. Seems so long ago now. The jewellery made for this project was the beginnings of the jewellery book. The jewellery arrived back just in time to include it in the talk. They were a good advert for the book!!

I had a good play with my new toy this week. I went to Whaley's in Bradford and bought several meters of coated silk on the roll to use on my A3 printer. I have had this printer over a year now and have been going to test out the flat feed function for thicker mediums. This week I did just that. I prepared lots of images to print. I used the flat feed function to print them out onto the silk using pigment inks for longevity. I got quite carried away and now have a pile of work to quilt/overpaint/embellish etc. The flat feed function is brilliant. Can't believe I waited so long to try it out.

Here is the first of those pieces.

I used one of the Art Nouveau designs I found as a design source.

This colour scheme is nice but I had a play with it and came up with this:

I printed this blue version onto the silk. Then I free machine quilted it using a slightly thicker dark blue thread for the thicker limes, a normal rayon thread for the rest of the dark blue lies and a light blue thread for the rest. When the quilting was complete I used French knots on the flowers, dress and head band. Unfortunately the print ended slightly short so that the bottom border band was narrower than the other three sides. I decided, therefore, to add a border which would overlay the dark blue border on the print. I had some dark blue simulated leather cloth which was perfect for the job. I cut the pieces and stitched them around the quilt.

It was at this point I made the decision to turn the quilt into a panel for a bag. I cut the rest of the bag pieces out of the blue leather fabric and found some blue flowered fabric which would work OK for the lining. In fact, it was the fabric from a bridesmaid's dress from many years ago and I had to unpick and iron it as it was still a dress.

Once the bag was finally stitched together I made some tags for it to hang from the handle. Cheekily I used my logo as one of them.

Here is a close up of one of the tags.

So the mistake on the printout led to this bag, another successful rescue.

I can now choose the next piece from the big pile of prints!! but which one???

Cheers everyone.