Saturday 3 November 2012

Back from Dubai and on with my Venice project again.

We have had a lovely hot week in Dubai. We didn't do as much photography as usual. We wanted to have a more relaxing time this visit.  We hit a festival week while we were there and we were able to watch folk dancers from around the world.  They performed every night on a stage on the side of The Creek.  There was a firework display half way through the performances.  It was holiday week in Dubai so everywhere was very busy - a bit too busy.  Even so, we enjoyed our week.
Now it is time to get back to my Venice project.  Again, I have quite a number of pieces finished so this might be quite a long post.
This set of pieces was the result of playing with a close up image of the decorative stone work around a church door.



The first of the pieces was a panel.  It is A4 in size.  I made a stencil and a stamp of the stone flower tile which was stamped all over the background fabric.  I used interference paints on a silver and dark grey fabric.  I stencilled the design onto black cotton, then padded and stitched the outline of it.  These three padded accents were stitched onto the background.  The spiral column was made by creating a paper cast of a piece of fancy wood.  It was painted black and wrapped with dyed metallic fingering and interference paint finger rubbed along the dips.  The narrow spiral was a straw, wrapped with black tape and over wrapped with the metallic fingering.  Three stamped black cards were hung from the bottom. The finished piece was mounted on thick card.


Using the same colour scheme and design, I made a small pocket page booklet.



The pocket pages were stamped with the flower design.



I also made a purse and a bag tag using this colour scheme and design.



The next piece used the image of the facade of a hotel in Venice.



I put this image into Photoshop and applied a posteriser filter.



I liked the effect so decided to create an art quilt.  I made line patterns of the image and joined them together.  It was to be a large art quilt so it took eight A4 sheets to print out the pattern.  I traced this onto white cotton lawn.  I used fabric paints to paint the design.  I made a quilt sandwich and free machined the design.  When the machining was complete I sponged the hanging basket flowers and then hand stitched hundreds of French knots over the top.



In the last post I showed a set of pieced which were based on a bronze window metal grill.  I decided to use this design again only this time keep to the bronzy colour of the metal grill.
I selected an area of the grill and sized it to create the four sides of a vessel. This was printed out and traced onto tracing paper for the machining pattern.  I used pelmet vilene for the base of the sides.  I painted them with bronze metallic paint.  Next I ironed copper transfer foil over the surface and covered this with a layer of bronze metallic sheer fabric and a layer of black voile mache over that.  The pattern was pinned in place and I free machined the design.  I used a soldering iron to cut away some of the design at the top centre of each side.  They were satin stitch edged and joined together to create a vessel.



The final two pieces for this post was another one of my rescue pieces.  The design used an image of the ripple reflections under a bridge in Venice.



I took this image into Photoshop and applied different colour effects.  I came up with twelve different designs.  I planned to make these twelve designs into one long art quilt.  I intended to print two at a time on white cotton. The idea behind this was to give my A3 printer a run once per month to prevent any clogging which I had  to clear when it was left for a long time between uses. When they were all printed and I came to lay them out I realised that I had forgotten to flip half of them.  Rethink.
If I made an eight long panel, used some of them for a tote bag front panel and one for a book cover, I would only have to reprint a couple of them. So that is what I did.  Each small panel was free machine quilted, satin stitch edged and joined together to create this art quilt.



I made one of the panels into the front for a book cover.



I still have the four panels to make into the front panel of a tote bag but as I became a bit tired of machining so many ripple panels, I decided to put them to one side and do something else for a change.
As I like the result of the bronze sides of the vessel, I decided to use this technique again and create some jewellery.  Hope to have it completed for the next post.

Cheers until then.