FINISHED: Fabric Paper Wall Hanging

I finished the fabric paper wall hanging! Yay! Here it is freshly installed on one of the walls in my living room. You can click on the photo to get a better view of each square. The lighting isn't perfect but I wanted to take a photo as soon it was up. I'll take more photos of it in it's surroundings today. I love looking at it as I sit in my favorite room.

I'm very pleased with the colors I chose as I was dying the sheets of fabric paper. I think they all go together beautifully and tie-in really well with the colors in my living room. Even hubby got excited as I was joining the last few jump rings together. He said he couldn't visualize what I was trying to do as I worked on the individual parts. Now he gets it! :) I ended up with 94 squares (3" x 3"), all beaded, with 4 eyelets and jump rings to each square.

Here is a closeup of a few of the squares:


And another shot. Sorry, this one is a little blurry:

It felt so good to complete this project. It turned out just as I had envisioned it! I fell in love with the smaller version of this in the book, Stitch Alchemy, by Kelli Perkins. It wouldn't leave my head! As soon as I saw it, I fell in love with it. But I knew I wanted to do a much larger version of it than what was in the book. And I'd have to figure out how to hang it on something larger. It all worked out just fine. The rod is 36" wide and the finished piece fits perfectly in the space I wanted to put it into.

If finishing every project gives me such a feeling of satisfaction, I'm off to a good start for the New Year. I think I picked the perfect word of intent as my focus.

This and That

OK, are you in the mood for Halloween yet? It's coming! It's very cold and rainy here today and that put me in the mood to create a digital piece reflecting the season. I've used the image of the hooded doll before but I love her! She's just perfect for haunting scenes!

Other news: Here are my latest sheets of fabric paper that I'm making for my wallhanging. First, though, is a finished square! I decided they will be 3" x 3". This one is cut from a sheet I showed previously. I added some bronze seed beads and now all I need to do is put in the eyelets:

Here are the two sheets with the color added:


I think I'll add the gold spray webbing to these. I really like the look and the texture it gives. I may add a few more bits of color in spots. We'll see.

I'm not having a whole lot of luck in taking my own photos for the photo journaling course. So, I'm still using free images that speak to me. They fit the theme and this allows me to keep up with the course. I plan to take some photos today as soon as I find something I've been looking for all day! Eventually I will find it and then I can at least have one of my photos in a journal spread.

I did originally print out a few photos that I had in my archive for this latest assignment. These may still work; I'm thinking about it. They were photos that my Mom and Dad had taken, so technically I guess they're mine. ;) I'm working on the background now and hope to post the spread by the end of the week.

Fabric Paper: The Next Step

Today I colored the base fabric pieces that I made yesterday (see yesterday's post). Here are the results from my experiment so far. The top photo is my favorite. The pink is just the right shade for what I think I want to go for in my huge batch I'm going to make for my wallhanging.

Here is the second piece. In this one I used more of the butterscotch color than the pink. But I like this one, too:

This last one is very vibrant. I used the butterscotch and plum spray inks at full strength. For some reason the plum shows up as more of a red color here. It's really more of a dark purple:

Overall, I like all of these samples. I am still going to add something to this last one. Also will start tomorrow on a big batch for my wallhanging squares. I'm thinking about doing most of them in the design of the first two. I used scrapbooking paper, wrapping paper, tissue paper with iridescent dots, wallpaper border and plain, white tissue paper. The inks I used were Adirondack Color Inks in Butterscotch and Wild Plum.

Today I wanted to spend more time on a new batch but somehow ended up destroying my Yahoo email account and now am unable to access it. Spent way too many hours trying to figure it out to no avail. So I opened another one and spent all afternoon trying to change my email address in all of my Yahoo groups...big headache. Hopefully my mail will get to me via this new account now. I couldn't access my old email addresses to even tell people that I can't read it anymore... Needless to say I'm not loving the computer today.

Anyway, tomorrow I will spend working on a new batch and adding a little something else to the bottom piece. I highly recommend the Stitch Alchemy book. There are a ton of ideas for embellishing your base fabric paper. I'll keep you posted on any new ones that I try.

Fabric Paper Revisited

If you've been following my blog, a while back I made a big batch of fabric paper for a fat book swap. I really loved the process and still have some of that paper. Now I'm experimenting with taking the fabric paper a bit further.

These photos are just the first step. Basically, I've made a raw batch of fabric paper without adding any color yet. What little color you do see is from the collage papers. So I have my muslin backing, my collage papers and my tissue paper all glued down and dried. Here is another sheet using the same collage papers:

Here is a larger sheet using different papers and more variety of tissue paper:

I belong to a Yahoo group called Mixed Media Art Friends, led by Belinda Spiwak. We are doing a book study following this book:

The author has taken fabric paper a step further and applied all kinds of techniques to the basic layer. So, first things first: make a raw batch with no embellishments. That is what you see here. I'm going to let these get really good and dry and leave them be overnight. Tomorrow the fun begins. There are a ton of ideas in the book for coloring the paper with dyes, paints, inks, etc. and embellishing it with everything. First, I'll color these and then will show you the results of that.

What I'm wanting to do, eventually, is make a really nice, huge batch of these sheets colored the way I want and then cut them into squares (size yet to be determined). The book shows this awesome wall hanging with squares that have eyelets in them. The squares are connected through the eyelets by wire. That is what I want to do but on a larger scale. First I need to make a batch with the colors I want. Then, I'll figure out how to proceed. Stay tuned...

Tell Me I'm Dreaming...

Well, last night I had a big scare. I thought that I had been doing my fabric paper technique wrong! Ahhh!! Nightmare! But, after I started breathing again... I figured out it was OK after all. What I've done so far is technically correct. I am not completely happy with the results, but it's fine.

I was reading over an old issue of Somerset Studio and someone had used the technique in some pretty little hat boxes. But I noticed her fabric paper didn't look anything like mine! After reading further, I saw where her technique was different. In the last step, instead of just putting bits of tissue paper here and there, which I happen to like, she adhere a whole sheet over the entire page. Ahh...that is why her fabric paper had such a soft look. They had an entire sheet of tissue paper covering the images, almost like a see-through curtain.

So, today I tried it her way. Tomorrow when they are dry I'll see if there is a big difference. I know there will be because a couple of the sheets I did yesterday with the magazine pages didn't have any tissue paper at all (NOT really the correct technique), since I was thinking that was optional. Duh! So, after thinking about how to use those magazine page sheets, I figured I'll adhere them as a base for my collages, then paint over those or cover parts up however I want to.

After finishing the eight sheets I did today, I decided to make a little digital collage about dreaming. That's what too little sleep and a big project will do to you!

Holiday Memories ATC's

Here are three of the five ATC's I have made for the Artella Holiday Memories ATC Swap. I want to get the other two made today and all of them mailed out tomorrow. The deadline for mailing isn't until Dec. 3 but I have so many other things in the works that I'd like to get these marked off my list so I can concentrate on my big projects.

I'm pretty happy with these so far. You can click on each photo to get a better view. I found this glittered white scrapbook paper that just looked like snow with either the sun or the stars shining down on it. I knew it would be a perfect backdrop for these memory cards. I now have to decide on how I want to do the remaining two. I'll post those when they are finished.

Other things in the works: I've signed up for an art techniques swap. This is a big project. I recently joined the Art Techniques Yahoo group. This is a group whose main focus is on art techniques; not so much the art itself, but the backgrounds and effects you get when you make your art. This sounded real interesting. I started looking at their photos and they have some very talented artists; some whose names I recognize from the Somerset Studio magazine and other Stampington publications. So I knew I was in the right place.

I was sad to see that they had just completed a fat book swap. What is a fat book? It's a sampler book of, in this case, 120 different art techniques. The swap entailed each artists making as many 4" x 4" pages as there were people signed up for the swap. That swap had 120 people signed up, so each artist made 120 separate pages; one for each participant. They used the same technique that they had signed up for on each of their pages, but they had to make 120 separate pages. No photocopies allowed. Basically you just make a big bunch of huge sheets of your technique and cut it down to 120 individual 4 x 4 sheets. Anyway, that swap had just ended and people were starting to receive their box of pages in the mail.

One person was responsible for hosting this swap. What a job! She had to make sure that each person who sent her a box of 120 pages of their technique had actually sent 120 pages. (You were supposed to include a couple of extra pages, just in case your count was off.) Then she had to swap them all out. She had 120 people mail her their boxes of pages. Then she had to turn around, swap all of them out and mail 120 packages back to the participants. You include the postage for her when you sign up, so she's not out any money. It's mind-boggling, but it seemed to work out pretty well. Everyone was raving about their packages! They received 120 loose pages that they would then bind however they wanted to. It would be impractical for the poor hostess to have to also BIND the pages. Plus, people have their own way of how they want to bind their pages, or even IF they want them bound.

So I was feeling let down that they had just finished this huge project, when one day one of the messages said, "Why not do another one?" I perked right up and before I knew it they had a database set up for people to register for the 2009 fat book swap! Yay!! I signed up the first day and picked as my technique, "fabric paper". It's a technique I read about by the artist Beryl Taylor. I saw it in the premier issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine about 4 years ago. They have since revisited the technique, but I keep all of those mags and I have her step by step instructions on how to do it. Sooo... that is what I really want to start working on. I love my ATC's, but I'm ready to start tackling this project!

I'll explain more about the technique and how I'm doing different variations as I get into it. Stay tuned...