Fabric collage! A look at projects and the process I used.

hi this is suzanne in ohio hey today i'm sharing um fabric collage projects well one completed project and two or three ongoing but uh this project has turned out so well for myself and some fellow crafters that are coming into the house once a week and i just had to share it so what you're looking at here is my first completed project with this particular technique and i chose a bird of course anything pretty or nature is what i like uh there's a lot to be said about fabric collage i looked at several youtube videos and i've read some in the books and so on and so forth but i improvised with my own technique to accomplish what i wanted to accomplish so let me walk you through that process by using here some photos that i took during the ongoing process now i take the photos specifically to just see with my own eye what's going on because sometimes from a photo you can tell better what you're okay my zoom is not responding let me see okay we're just gonna go with it here okay so um what you'll see at the top and i'm sorry please excuse a photo paper with the glare that's what i had to do up here is a photo of my first steps of starting i had a photo from the internet or copyright free and i printed it off in color i also printed off a high contrast which i don't have a sample up to show you right now then i printed off an enlarged black and white and in most cases i had to do it in two parts and splice it and paste it together tape it together so i have a black and white photo and then i take that black and white photo and i mount it just tape it onto some foam board the foam board really comes in handy if you're going to try this just go to walmart and get a cheap piece of photo or foam board same thing your kids used in science projects when they were in school all right now all the instructions out there on the internet say you know you can lay a piece of parchment over top of your photo and then work on top of it by looking through the parchment but my black and white was so light uh i'm working from a photo not a pattern printed on fabric or anything like that so i had to improvise so after thinking it long and hard what i decided to do was take a piece of netting cheaper the better the bigger holes the better and i just laid it over top of my photograph and you know put straight pins into the the foam board to hold it in place and then i started adding my pieces of fabric and i'll explain how i did that in a minute on top of the netting so you're seeing the photograph but you're applying the colored fabrics to the netting in the shape of the bird so you can see here i did his breast wings i was just getting my feet wet so i took it nice and slow and then right here i cannot get my zoom to respond so i'm sorry here's my photograph and then i've moved further along i've filled in more of the bird here you can see and then when the bird was completely done such as right here i cut him out of the netting and then started thinking about what his background should be i treated a piece of fabric here to suit my own needs whatever i wanted hold on just a second let me see if i can get my zoom to respond nope it just isn't okay all righty hold on okay so i begin to lay i laid him i was happy with my background and i began to audition several ways to do something around him to make him look nestled in i tried some just cut out leaves some stained dyed lace i tried a different position here and what i finally ended up doing was um this layout with maple leaves because i have those uh i call them pen maples but they're a certain type of a silver maple in my backyard so that fabric i treated also because i just didn't have the perfect print a fabric to use so i doctored up my own fabric fabric and there's one of my layouts those are just laying on there and then when i finally decided what the perfect layout was um this is of course how he ended up and i took this picture with um a lot of light coming from the side so that i could see what my quilting uh was looking like you can see that quilting or the light causes all the quilting dimples to show up really drastically but it doesn't look like that in real life uh but i want to make sure i got them in the right place so here he is and hold on a second maybe this is responding now i don't know and here he is in real life and he's beautiful all right so uh let me show you a couple other people's projects and see if i can do a better job explaining this all right this is my sister's project let's start with these little photos so um here's where she first started maybe this will work i don't know and uh she's done a clematis blossom so here's her photo here's her high contrast and here's grayscale photo in the background and with a piece of netting over top of it and she's beginning to lay colors on that here it is a little further along and then here's all the petals complete right there and she did one or two leaves because they look like they overlapped one of the petals so here's where she's at now what she has done is there's a nice view of the clematis blossom you can see it's a lot of tiny little pieces and they're layered over top of each other and whatever you like uh you have an artist liberty to render that photograph a little bit more exaggerated or perfectly true to form whatever you want to do here's where she has chosen all the colors that are going to be in her background she is doing her entire piece right on top of the netting it's all going to be one she's not going to cut out that blossom and put it on a different background she's doing her background along with in the blossom in the same technique as as the flower is done so that's one way to do it but when i had the photograph of the rob or the baltimore oil he didn't have a good background so i had to find something um to nestle him in okay so here's another girl's um wow i don't even know if i'm going to be able to show you this because my zoom is not responding oh darn so let me try another okay well it's responding a little bit with that button it's not always but see there's three ways to adjust this zoom and my son is not here to help me okay so oh finally oh my god oh i hate to say that but that's how i feel right now okay so i can she's got it mounted on the phone and i'm just going to unpin one corner so you can see for sure this is just a piece of cheap netting laid right over the photo and actually it's not even white because i didn't have white with this big of holes in it so this is actually yellow but it doesn't matter one bit now let me lift up this corner so you can see it's laid right on top there's her grayscale photograph underneath so what i told the girls to do let me show you one more step in this because i had to work out this process they all got a high contrast print and a and the grayscale so on either one or both you mark off the sections of your bird first in great big sections and then decide if you want to do them all as one piece of fabric or if you want to divide those sections even smaller if you divide even smaller what you get is an opportunity to include more and different fabrics which adds only to the character just works out wonderful okay so i'm i'm going to show you what project came out of this one of course it's um let me see if i have the color one yeah american goldfinch and this was the photograph that i was going for okay high contrast just for reference because sometimes you need to go back and forth between these photographs to see what's really going on and then the large grayscale so i'll show you that project in a second but you can see how this project i'm just going to keep turning him around now i don't know if she will put her background right around this cardinal or if she will cut him out after he's fused and i'll explain that in a second cut him out after he's fused and then use him like a giant applique and put him on some kind of different background in this something can't even get this thing it's so big oh my gosh it finally decided to respond a little bit but if i leave him upside down you can see more of him now she's got a few touch-ups to do on here uh for one thing she forgot to do the bottom portion of this bill so she's got a little raggy piece of black right there which she's going to leave and it'll be covered up with the bottom part of this bill and she used large sections and really took her artist's liberty to shape the sections the way she wanted to she put a lot of curly cues or smooth little lines to indicate feathers it's just darling and because there is a stripy looking effect on the bird because of the way his wings fold um she just i suggested i i found it worked for me for instance these are the edge of his feathers but you can't do that in great detail without uh spending a lifetime doing that kind of thing so i suggested she put some black stripes on here and it gives the impression of exactly what it's supposed to be okay so that's her project and when these girls get their projects done i'll have to show you um how they look and what they end up doing with them so i have a map mantra mantra however you pronounce that i don't let anything out of my sight without um copying it so i copied i scanned my bird as much as him of him as i could get on the scanning screen and then shrink him down and print him off and my goal is to make cards or add images to my journals or whatever so keep that in mind now this is printed on um glossy photo paper so it doesn't get quite the contrast as the original but still looks very good all right so let me show you the back of this little guy traditional quilt mounting with these little triangle pockets and all you do is uh include that onto the background the backing before you put your binding on and then a little skewer in this case a tiny little dowel rod slips right up in there and then all you have to have is one tiny little tack in the wall to hang him up all right so back to our little goldfinch here again that was photo high contrast divided off into what could possibly be different sections and that changes as you go and then what happened here was when i would draw out what i was going to do it came through the netting and marked on the grayscale i think that was fine i love that that way i can reuse this again without having to rethink it so i'm going to attempt to show you that project and here he is and he is just barely in the basting stages now i had to come up with the background for him as well and what i did was use a lot of old uh tablecloths doilies uh dresser scarves and things like that and i got him into what i want to say a lace collage that i thought he looked good in and he's still not down yet i'm just barely beginning to baste him and all the laces where i need to once he is basted and i know nothing will shift then i will put some stuffing behind him a tiny bit and as i stitch him down around the edges he'll become nice and rounded and puffy looking um i just a couple little back stories here i originally was going to put him on like a thistle branch because they i quite frequently see them sitting on thistles they love to eat the seeds of milk thistles or even teasels there's different kind of thistles even canadian thistles they love it after those little flowers go to seed but i thought i don't i don't know but my girlfriend brought me this old tablecloth she's given me now two of them one was in its natural ecru kind of color but this one she had dyed a sage green years ago so um i ripped some pieces of it and suppressed it with alcohol ink so that i could get three shades of green so here's the color she had i did a green green almost a yellowy green and then i'm more of a bluer green darker green for the background and just layered it with scraps of lace here's a piece of a curtain a doily a crochet dresser scarf this is i don't know what you call this but it was somebody gave me these and i and this was the scraps i had so because it already been cut up and used on a different project so all of this stuff is laid in there and my sister helped me i always take photographs as i'm putting something together and if you look at it and photograph you can see if your composition is correct and i had something not quite right and she helped me and i shifted it around a little bit and this is going to be my layout i'm not changing it when it's all stitched and all the hand stitching and the quilting is done then i will and if you're interested in this part i'll put a medium weight pellon in the back not stitched down just something to help keep it straight and stiff and then my backing and then i'll choose a border and put it around and it'll be finished off uh just like the baltimore oil so okay what's the question now all right i forgot to bring the product let me see if i can explain this i can from this photograph of that all right you can see my sister has a page here and it's got little rectangles placed down on it what that page is is a sheet of light steam a seam tube now light steam a seam two is an adhesive that can be melted pressed and fused used as a fusing between fabrics well when you get a page of light steam a seam two it's actually the adhesive in a very tacky sticky state between two pages of release paper so you tear one back off and press your fabric down there and it will stay and then you cut your shapes out of it just like this remember we removed the top sheet of release paper this is sticking onto a sticky surface and it has a piece of release paper on the back so you cut your shapes out of this and then turn it over and there's a little trick remove the release paper on the back and then it will just lay and stick and press onto the netting or if you're using parchment paper or fabric it'll stick to those and you put everything down and it will stay you can trust it and that way it's it's sticking but it's not permanent if you want to rearrange something you can and there's lots of videos out there that show the tricks of that in in this case when my sister goes around this flower she'll just take a little straight pin and lift up the edge of those blossoms and slide the green right underneath it is just a marvelous product for this type of thing so that's how it's going and that's what we did and i'll be sure and show you my little goldfinch when he's all done uh if you have any questions leave it in down below and let's see what else i should say oh please subscribe if you haven't if you like paper arts and fabric arts i do a little bit of both so i hope you enjoyed this as far as fabric collage goes oh i thought of something else i should comment on on my baltimore oil and on this one after i got him all done i also applied some hand-dyed lace let's see if i can get this focused to how good it's going so i'll see if i can show you this but this um he's got a little bit of hand-dyed lace on him and i dyed batches of lace i think four years ago 15 different colors and i've got the right color here so i laid it some pieces over top of the fabrics that i had used just to give texture and a little bit of shading in some cases and whatever all right that's all my little tips and tricks for today but subscribe if you haven't already and leave a comment all right thanks for watching i appreciate it

Channel: Suzanne In Ohio Suzanne Cogar

Views: 421

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Fabric collage, quilt, quilting, slow stitch, slow stitching, wall hanging, sewing, hand sewing

Id: u0C52qHt-fs

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021