and then cut it up to make this beautiful little treasure chest.

This is the front view …

One side view …

The other side view …

And the back.

I like the way it turned out and it’s a great way to use up those beautiful pieces of fabric paper!

I just love the paper fabric technique because you can produce such beautiful surface texture and the piece can be as soft or rigid as you need. This time round I’ve been playing with adding some free motion embroidery and decorative stitches to the fabric paper before painting it.

Some of the results have not been so good which is annoying because it’s such a time consuming process, but I think I’ve finally found a process that works. I just love the results so far on this piece and can’t wait to finish it!

By the way, don’t forget to sign up for the new November mini-class at the Free Lunch Cafe – “Fabric Paper”. I’ll be sharing some of my favorite tips and techniques for making fabric paper.

What’s a Shrinky Dink? It’s a thin sheet of flexible plastic substance that when you put in the oven contracts in size, expands in thickness and hardens. You used to have to draw and create your own artwork on the original Shrinky Dinks, but now they’ve brought it out suitable for inkject printers and this now offers an amazingly simple and creative way to make embellishments of any shape, color and size.

For the little flowers and leaves on this art quilt, I designed the colors in photoshop then used the “cookie cutter” tool to create the shapes. I then printed them out on my printer, let them dry, then cut them out and zapped them with my heat gun.

The finished size is about 1/3 of the original and it expands in thickness approx 9 times so the finished pieces are nice and thick.

Before the pieces cooled, for the leaves I twisted the ends a little to give them some movement, and the flowers I pressed in the middle with the end of a pencil to form a slight bowl shape. I used a bead reamer to make the small holes before I heated them, and once they had been heated and cooled, I then colored the edges with a metallic gold painters pen. To seal the color, spray with an acrylic sealer.

This is a fabulous way to make your own embellishments and it’s so easy and fun!

Straight stitch is by far the most popular stitch when doing free motion quilting, but a narrow zig-zag stitch is also a great stitch, particularly when a strongly defined stitch line is needed.

I love to use the decorative stitches on my sewing machine; they’re a wonderful source of decorative embellishment for all sorts of applications and you’ll see a lot of my quilts and samples have some sort of decorative stitching on them.

You can use decorative stitches in many ways:

… instead of straight stitch for stitch-in-the-ditch.

… to sew down the bindings on your quilts.

… for couching

… to make quilt blocks

… to make ribbon effects

… to make decorative designs

Making “fabric paper” is one of my favorite techniques, particularly for small collage pieces. I generally make these pieces with texture in mind so that I can use them as a base for adding free motion quilting or embroidery. “Scraps” is a good example of a finished art quilt using fabric paper as a background.

So this weekend I spent a little time out in the dye room making some fabric paper backgrounds for some little collage pieces I wanted to do and I thought I’d share the instructions.

You’ll need some muslin, tissue paper, cheesecloth, pva glue, fabric paint or acrylic paint. You can also add other elements into the fabric paper such as images or fabric scraps; anything that can be glued down.

Take a piece of muslin and rinse it so that it’s damp.

Then make your glue mixture – a couple tablespoons of pva glue mixed with a little water so it’s nice and runny.

Then add some color; either fabric paint or acrylic craft paint.

Using a foam brush, slop on the paint so that the muslin is saturated.

Next add the tissue paper. You want a piece of tissue paper that is about twice the size of the muslin. Scrunch the tissue paper and using the flat side of the foam brush, mash it onto the top of the muslin. Use extra glue paint if necessary to flatten it down.

Now add bits of cheesecloth and mash them onto the top of the tissue paper. You can scrunch it or stretch it out.

Add bits of extra color for contrast.

Now go away and leave it alone until it dries. Since it’s a sloppy mess, this might take a little while.

Once they dry the pieces are quite stiff but handling them softens them up and of course they are fully stitchable.

I made four different backgrounds:

During a recent visit to the craft store, I stumbled across this interesting product – Krylon Webbing Spray.

You hold the can about 12-18″ above the item to be sprayed which can be fabric, paper or other types of surfaces. You then sweep across the surface as you spray and it comes out of the can kind of like silly string. It then floats onto the surface and adheres and dries.

Way cool – and a great surface design technique. It’s kind of stiff when it dries, but you can sew over it. Fun!

This tutorial will demonstrate how to make a three dimensional leaf using two layers of fabric fused together with fusible webbing.

Supplies

• Small scraps of leaf-colored fabric
• Thread to coordinate with the color of your fabric
• Fusible webbing
• Stabilizer: wash-away or heat-away
• Medium point or fine point Sharpie

Directions

• Draw a leaf shape on a piece of copy paper or cardboard to use as a template.



• Trace the outline onto your fabric with a Sharpie.



• Iron a piece of fusible web to the back of the design and fuse another layer of fabric to it.



• Set your machine to free motion straight stitch and stitch a center vein and side veins.



• Set your machine for narrow free motion zigzag and satin stitch a center vein.



• Free motion satin stitch around the outer edge of leaf following the marked design.



• Cut around the edge of the leaf, being careful not to cut the stitching.



• Set up your machine with a standard foot, feed dogs up and satin stitch slightly wider than the
  previous zigzag. Lay a piece of stabilizer under the leaf and satin stitch around the edge.



• Remove the stabilizer according the manufacturer’s directions.

Variations

• For a leaf with a soft edge, instead of fusing two layers of fabric together, insert one layer of fabric into a hand embroidery hoop and follow the instructions, omitting step 3.



• For a leaf that will hold it’s shape, place a piece of stabilizer under the leaf and zigzag a piece of thin craft wire into the outer edge of the leaf. A cording foot or open toed foot with feed dogs up works best for this. Alternatively, you could also stitch the craft wire down the center vein which would leave the edges of the leaf free.



• Vary the size, shape, fabric and design on your leaves for added interest.

You’ll might remember I started with this design in mind and ended up with this beautiful completed art quilt.

Well I decided to continue in series and now have three lovely little art quilts, each 21″ x 14″.

FLOWERS

LEAVES

POMEGRANATE

As I love to work with elements of nature, each of the quilts has a “nature theme”, and one of my favorite sources of inspiration, apart from photographs, is this great book
4000 Flower & Plant Motifs
which is just full of imaginative and decorative motif designs that you can use as a point of inspiration. Highly recommended if you love working with nature themes!

This was the result of the sample at the last installment:

Now I needed to add a little green because what’s purple and yellow without green? So I added some small machine embroidered leaves around the edges of the stalk and stem to liven things up.

Now for the edges. It would be really easy to simply bind off and finish it at that, but I wanted to give the piece a “soft edge” finish. As I had already used small circles as part of the flower design, I decided to use the circular design to finish the edges. I placed some water soluble stabilizer underneath along the edges (a great application for using up all those small scrappy pieces of stabilizer), then quilted a couple of rows of circles all around the edges – very organic looking.

Then I carefully snipped away the fabric from the outer edges being careful not to cut into the stabilizer.

Using an embroidery hoop to keep the stabilizer taught, I extended the circular stitching onto the stabilizer.

Then I washed away the stabilizer leaving a soft lacy edge.

The final touch was some hand beading to the central design;

and some bead clusters along the edges.

I then mounted the embroidery onto a quilted greenish colored hand-dyed background. The final size is 14″ x 21″. Considering the fabric that I started with, I’m really happy with the results.

I still have a few pieces of hand dyed fabric left over, so I might use them up in a similar fashion over the next month or so.