Chapter 12 - Continued!

... and so I've let myself down again, not, this time, through being lazy or allowing myself to become side-tracked, I genuinely feel that this project is bigger than anticipated! I did, however, promise Sian that I would post on my blog at least once a month, so here goes!

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I spent approximately 10 hours gathering stupid little circles to shibori dye the lining for my bag (a nice little job to do whilst sitting with dh pretending to watch telly of an evening - otherwise known as 'quality time!'). This has now been dyed and I am in the process of unpicking the stitching. The result does not look as good as my sample piece - I would guess that this is either because I was dyeing a greater amount of fabric, or because my dye powder is older.

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I spent approximately 4 hours printing and stitching the 'white' fabrics, and a further 4 hours piecing the log cabin patchwork design ready to cut out my 'white' panels. I am very proud of the resulting patchwork - it seems a shame to cut into it!







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A further 6 hours were spent dying, bleaching and decoratively stitching my 'black' fabrics.








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Stitching, cutting, stitching and cutting the crunchy fabric for my 'black' panels took about 4 hours. There is only enough fabric here to cut out the panels for one side of the bag, so am in the process of producing another 2 identical pieces of this, one for the other side of the bag and one for the gusset.

Chapter 12 - SAMPLES

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The reverse of the bag is to be a mirror image of the front. I tested out the piecing of the curved seams with some commercially printed fabrics. (The finished bag will be made from hand dyed and decorated fabrics.) I couldn’t decide whether to face the seams inwards or outwards, so I experimented with both on the sample piece. This didn’t help very much as I liked both options! However I did notice that the white fabric appeared to dominate where the seams faced inwards, and the black fabric appeared to dominate where the seams faced outwards.


I tried top-stitching either side of the inward facing seams, with a decorate stitch, but was not happy with this. (The finished bag is to have a lot of decorative stitching within the patchwork panels.)

I cut the ‘black’ and ‘white’ panels from patched fabrics including a 1cm seam allowance. The exposed seams looked much better when I trimmed them down to 0.5cm. I decided to opt for this.

Another factor to decide upon was the interlining. Pelmet Vilene or quilters batting? My original idea was for a casual, heavily textured, tactile bag, so I opted for the quilters batting. The pelmet Vilene would have resulted in a more rigid bag which is not what I wanted. I quilted my sample bag panel to the batting by stitching ‘in the ditch’, following the black & white seams. For the inwards facing seams I used a walking foot attachment, however, the exposed seams were more difficult to stitch. I tried using a darning foot, but eventually found the zipper foot to be the easiest as I was able to ease this underneath the exposed seam and stitch closely to the joining seam of the black & the white panels.

As the last panel on both the left and the right side of the bag is ‘white’ (and also taking into consideration the fact that I want the bag to be heavily textural), I will make the gusset from black heavily textured fabric as in the ‘black’ panels on the front and back of the bag. The gusset would need to be joined to the bag using exposed seams to coincide with the seams on the front and back of the bag. Consideration will need to be given to the batting at this point. It will probably need to be cut away from the seam prior to stitching. The gusset pattern will need to be extended by about 3cm at either end in order to attach the link for the bag handle/strap.

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The lining is to be made from a hand dyed cotton shibori fabric. I have decided upon the hand stitched circles as this offers an interesting contrast to the stripes on the outside. It is a tedious, time consuming design, but well worth the effort I think. The lining will be made up separately from the bag and machine stitched around the top of the bag, leaving an opening in the lining for turning.

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I have experimented with various materials for the handle links. I have made the rectangular shapes from (top to bottom) silver painted mdf, fimo, friendly plastic, and cardboard, wrapped with silver faux leather. I found the slightly irregular, hand-made quality of the ‘friendly plastic’ link to be the most pleasing and in keeping with the rough, frayed effect of the bag design. The test piece was made in blue/green plastic as this was all I had, but I have obtained some silver plastic for the finished bag.

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I made a small strip to test the bag handle and the fastening strap. This worked well using the quilters batting as it gave stability to the strap without making it too rigid. I tested out the silver decoration on the end of the fastening with faux leather. This would probably have been better trimmed after stitching. Although I glued it in place first, it still moved slightly and exposed the fabric underneath on one side.





MY AIM IS TO COMPLETE THE BAG BEFORE THE END OF MAY. The basic construction should be fairly easy, but there is a lot of fabric preparation to carry out before-hand.

Chapter 12 - Ideas for Designing a Functional, Three Dimentional Embroidered Item

Stage 1

A selection of small three dimentional shapes made from calico.

 Stage 2

Based upon animal patterns and shapes researched earlier in the module, and with the idea of using the patchwork and embroidery techniques learned in the previous chapters, I designed the following three dimentional objects that would be fun to make.

I chose to proceed with the bag. Partly due to time constraints, it is relatively small and quite manageable, but also because I feel that it demonstrates and combines a lot of the techniques learned within this module.

The 'mock-up' of the bag was made from decorators lining paper. I found this quite sturdy to work with. The bag can easily be deconstructed so that the panels can be used as paper patterns. (Seam allowances will obviously need to be added). At this point it occurred to me that I would need a gusset between the front and back panels of the bag to give it depth.

Using my decorated papers, I cut out the individual panels that will make up the side sections of the bag. The idea is that these panels would all be cut from a large patchwork block. The darker sections from a seminole patchwork made from dark fabrics, decorated with machine stitching, seams facing inwards. The lighter sections would be cut from a large block of messy, continually cut, and re-seamed fabric with seams facing towards the front. This should create a contrast in texture as well as a cotrast in shade.

I am concerned about being able to find metal links of the desired size, and the metal 'belt tip' for the flap of the bag. I am considering the possibility of decorating the end of the flap with silver leather, and making the links for the strap from wood (painted in silver), or perhaps from friendly plastic by making a suitable mould.

Chapter 11 - Further Design Exercises leading to Fabric Samples

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Experimenting with a number of different ways to arrange, cut, and rearrange strips of paper into wonderful patterns. Consideration was given to extremes of tone in bold, large areas, Grouping dark tones and light tones together, Medium tones and smaller shapes giving more pattern effect and lighter, greyer tones as the blacks and whites are mixed up in tiny fragments. 

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 The following samples use the 'stack & whack' method of cutting.

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 Lines of machine stitching onto bleached and mono-printed fabrics.

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 Stitched fabric samples based on a few of the above paper designs, using the machine stitched fabrics to give emphasis on the use of stitchery, along with forward facing seams, giving a rich, crunchy, textural result.

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 knotted strips of fabric and a frayed insert were added to the final seams to give extra detail.

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 A single length of zipper was added to the final seam.

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A sample showing different stages of comlexity.

The Challenge

The top third is the first stage - simply seaming black and white strips of fabric together.

The middle section has been cut a few times and re-arranged, twice.

The bottom section has been cut, re-arranged and re-stitched until I could not cut through the layers any more.

It was interesting to see that although I had originally started with a wider strip of fabric on the third section, the resulting surface was comparatively tiny because of the amount of seams involved.

Never mind how disconbobulated it became, there were still beautiful patterns emerging on both the back and the front of the new surface.

Chapter 10 - Piecing - A Method of Cutting and Seaming

The exercise was caried out in paper first. This gave better insight into what I was trying to achieve and the problems I might face when working with fabric. I was able to experiment with ideas and find out what worked, and what didn't.

 For the fabric sample, two lengths of fabric, 15cm x 90 cm were joined, wrong sides together, and the seam was frayed and pressed open.

The second cuts were made vertically, alternate strips were flipped, then the panels were joined, right sides together, and the seams pressed open.

 The third cuts were diagonal, the panels rotated, then joined together, wrong sides together, and the seams pressed to one side.

 Vertical cuts were made through the previous stage, panels were re-arranged and joined right sides together with frayed fabric sewm into the seams.

 Horizontal cuts were made. Panels were re-arranged and staggered. The seams were then decorated with folded triangles.

Linda Miller

I was really excited to be doing a workshop with Linda Miller and the Wolverhampton ladies, but struggled with my promise to myself to keep everything within my Module 2 theme. After the African influence of the Mary Sleigh meeting, however, it occurred to me that I could do a zebra, with its lovely stripes, and keep to the theme of black, white and rusty coloured (bleached black!), whilst practicing my machine embroidery!

THE ZEBRAS by ROY CAMPBELL
From the dark woods that breathe of  fallen showers,
Harnessed with levels rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers.

We had a lovely day. Linda is a really nice tutor. Very friendly, encouraging and helpful. Everybody ended up with excellent results.