Trapped Fibres! (and other experiments)

I had a lot of fun this Easter holidays with experimenting with some of the bits'n'bobs I bought at the recent Sewing for Pleasure show - below are some of the yarns and other bits of fibres and fabrics "trapped" between layers of the sticky soluble stuff purchased from Arthur Ridley; I machine stitched the sandwiched before dissolving and then needle punched it into a "pattern" on some felt (this counts as being HOMEWORK! too! - pattern being our end of term project).

Betty Barnden in a recent issue of Sewing World magazine had a little bag project in which fabrics were similarly trapped and I was rather taken with the "pattern" achieved and decided to have a go myself:
Here you can see I've laid a piece of pale green silk dupion, atop are cut bits of other fabrics with some long strips of nylon and then a piece of polyester organza in palest pink is placed on top and the whole piece is free machined in a nice pattern before cutting into two bag shapes and assembling. (I made my bag up a little differently and omitted the button closure as I don't plan to use this bag - too small for practical purposes being the main reason) And I beaded one side mainly to experiment with my recent purchase of assorted tubes of beads and the new book on beaded bags had some neat ideas eg the little loops and fringes which were fun!


The bag will go into my sketch book as a sample for both pattern and working with solubles too, I would repeat this for some other project in the future I feel certain!

Before breaking for Easter holidays, we were tasked with looking at "pattern" and I scratched my head for days and wondered whether it was too late to swap for flower arranging or sugarcraft! before deciding to do a set of different treatments on one simple pattern:

Using the basic idea of cutting out a square into two "shapes" and placing them on a piece of paper and framing the two shapes to create a simple pattern, I worked on a machined piece (above right) in which I used machine stitches and couched yarns to create the pattern. Next I worked on a piece of felt, needle felting some of my new fibres into the rectangle sections and needle felting the yarns to reproduce the same pattern as before (above left). Finally the sample at the bottom is the finished piece of the yarns and fibres that I'd sandwiched right at the start of this post between the soluble sticky backed stuff, free machined, then soaked/dried and cut into shapes and used some yarn to hand stitch all onto a piece of black Linton Tweed (sample/fabric) which I re-discovered while tidying and sorting my sewing room!


The final piece, above, is just bits of merino and some of the silk rods (from Sewing for Pleasure, temporarily forgotten "whom" I bought them from!) and I have a nice varigated embroidery yarn to finish it off with some hand stitching too!