Well, I was going to get on with couching threads around my collage and the blue one is sitting by my sewing machine with a bundle of matching threads as I type. But on Sunday someone at church asked me to make a tree for an Easter collage – they started doing one with the kids at their youth group but didn’t realise they weren’t meeting this week so they need to make it themselves. So collages and knitting duly abandoned, I dug out my notes for the Elements in Fabric course I did at Quilt University last year. And I dug out my Xpandaprint to add texture to the trunk and branches and painted a tree on a piece of background fabric. Here it is, waiting to be expanded:
The Xpandaprint doesn’t keep for ever and it was getting a bit gungy so of course I had to finish the jar – no point in letting it hang around for a few more months and go to waste! Of course not. So I painted some rocks in case I ever start the earth piece (I completed the water, air and fire ones but ran out of steam before I got to earth). Here they are, sprinkled with fine glitter and Jacquard mica powder. It’s a bit hard to see the Xpandaprint because they are on white fabric.
To link it up to the Symbols course I thought I’d print a few with a couple of the blocks I made. Here is one of them, on orange acrylic felt (I thought I could do a bit of melting and distorting later). It prints really well on to felt.
Here it is expanded. I have left the other things to dry because the instructions say to (to avoid puffing them up too much, I think) but I expanded this one straight away.
Next step is to heat the tree and rocks to expand them, paint them and add highlights with Markals.
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