...so it was really sheer fabric and right after i asked what if(?) i draw some more dots over the flocked dots i thought what if(?) i put another patterned fabric beneath the sheer before making it into a quilt block.
nothing new i guess, but i like the look of the stripes through the dots it and it gave the lightweight fabric more body to work with.
...i often sketch my appliques directly on fabric and then needle turn to hide the lines. today i wondered what if i don't worry so much about the lines? maybe if they show here and there i would get a nice sketchy effect. this ghostly beast was drawn freehand on an old stained linen with micron archival pen. permanent. sewn down needle turned style, quickly (with out worry). there is an embroidered border on the old linen randomly running through the figure. stitched to a dobby woven cotton background with additional embroidered details in very pale colors ...again over drawn lines. i love this so much i am leaving here now to do some more.
area shown here is 4" x 5".
i always associated fortuny with pleated fabric, not knowing much else about them. after receiving some small gifted pieces from phyllis, i was amazed by the strange and unfamiliar technique used in this print. (shown front and back) ... at first glance the design appears to be a woven damask, but looking closer it is obvious that the fabric is a solid twill and the design has been produced by layering pigment and dye perhaps in combination of screen printing and hand painting. and after some research it is apparent that the technique is not exactly known. it is indeed unique.
my limited experience with prints has at least left me with enough knowledge to recognize the difference in nature between the colored areas of the design, the lighter greenish part is much stiffer and the pigment lies on the front surface, probably applied over the gold hand dyed/painted ground. on a whim i asked myself what if (?) i draw dots and fill them in so the colored area spans both the soft and hard surfaces of the design. i was guessing that they would absorb the color differently. they did as the gold sucked up the ink and the pigment print ...which has a metallic nature...resisted a bit. two tone dots. very cool and just another layer of pigment. i think it fits the fortuny mood of the fabric.
i also tried it with other colors. and lines. a sort of resist technique using the nature of a pigment print.
I guess it started here with this fussy cut. And it seemed a bit boring so I asked myself what if I just shade the petals of the flower a bit, just to kick it up a notch... why not ? Many prints these days are not as detailed as the old ones. It's a shame....because of the speed of the machines and the cost of screens. Maybe i can fix that.... slowly.
I used the ochre colored Pitt Pen to add some dimension.
...then I took a look at the fabric that I cut the fabric from. And I asked once again, what if I add some definition? I actually got carried away. Oh! The possibilities with this one... especially if you can draw.
What if I draw the dots and leave the outline when filling in with embroidery ? I think they will look shaded. More dimensional. Pitt Pen and cotton floss ( 2 strands) over painted linen.
I suppose I was continuing with this idea...when I asked myself ...and what if the cutout was a dot and what if the collage was just a machine free pieced striped base? I sewed the stripes crazy style, every which way, and prepared the dot mask by tracing the bottom of a glass on a cotton linen solid and shading with a crayon for the shading. I cut out the centers (which I saved of course) and ironed the crayon in and washed and ironed again. Now what if I stitch the layers together ?
I have decided to revisit a concept I call library quilts, something conceived to display collections of fabrics . This time, small quilts, documenting specific experiments. This one has evolved from the question... what if I paint dots ....mostly on wet fabric ?. A blurry dot sampler.
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..Ii needed some special dot fabric for a project. I was searching when I thought what if I make my own? Polka dots drawn directly over a sheer print. Pen and watered down acrylic paint on cotton/linen. This sample shown after one quick pass with a hot iron and a machine wash. You know I will do more of this.