FINISHED: Fabric Paper Wallhanging

I finished the fabric paper wallhanging! Yay! Here it is hanging on a wall in my living room. You can click on the photo for a larger view. The lighting isn't perfect but I wanted to get a photo of it tonight. I'll take more photos of it tomorrow in it's surroundings. 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. I think they all go together beautifully. They also tie-in really well with the colors in my living room. Even hubby got excited as I was joining all of those little jump rings together. He said he couldn't visualize what I was doing as I was working on it but now he gets it! I ended up with 94 squares, all beaded, with 4 eyelets and jump rings in each square.

Here is a closeup of a few squares:

And another shot. This one is a little blurry:

It felt so good to complete this project. I knew when I started it that it would take a while. I just kept plugging along, beading the squares at night while I watched TV. That brings me to my next item.

My Word For This Year: Finished.

I've noticed the trend in a lot of my favorite blogs to select a "word for the year". I like that idea. You pick a word that you would like to focus your intentions on for the coming year. My word, as I said, is finish. That's a big one for me. And a close second would be the word believe. As in, believe you can finish what you set out to do!

It's no secret that I LOVE new projects and new challenges. I LOVE to start them. I LOVE to keep starting them... I fall a little short on the finishing part. ;) I really, really want to concentrate on that aspect this year. Involved in all of that will be my art journal. It will be my ally and my confidante through this journey. I set my intentions there... the follow-through, the finishing will be recorded there as well.

I think I'm off to a good start. I wanted to share this tonight. I'll have better photos of the entire room tomorrow and will post those soon. Right now I have to FINISH cleaning up. :)

Abstract Painting or Fabric Paper?

Here's a new take on the fabric paper. I covered the entire sheet of muslin with magazine images. I chose images with lots of color and interesting shapes. Then I covered the entire sheet in white tissue paper. When it dried the tissue paper really stood out as a white film over the entire sheet so I tried to figure a way to color it, while still leaving some of the magazine images showing through.

The top image doesn't show much of the magazine pages but I like the color blocking. I used a lot of water soluble oil pastels for color. I rubbed them in really good and then used a brush dipped in water to work them in further. Then I just barely spritzed some Adirondack Color Wash on certain spots. I love this paper. It's almost like an abstract painting just as it is!

Here is the second sheet using the magazine paper:

You can see that more of the images from the magazines are visible in this one. I don't like the dark middle, though. As soon as it dries I am going to cover it with something. Those were circles from the magazine and I wasn't too happy with them after I colored them so I'll just glue something else there.

To color this one I used the same things as above but added Metallic Gold and Bronze Lumiere paints. I love the shimmer that they give. I also spritzed on some Turquoise fabric dye. I like this sheet, too, and will cut it up to use in other projects after I figure out what I'm going to do with the middle.

I originally made these sheets way back when I did my first batch of fabric paper for the fat book swap. What I had failed to do then was add the top layer of tissue paper. I really didn't like the plastic feel of the sheets and I almost threw them out. But I held on to them thinking I'd be able to use them for something.

So I pulled them out yesterday and decided I'd try to add the tissue paper now. The sheet is much softer and very pliable. Now, to fix that middle spot and these will be ready to go!

New Fabric Paper And An Embellishment

I've been furiously making sheets of fabric paper for the wallhanging I'll eventually start to put together. I decided the squares will be 3" x 3". Here is a sample of a square that has yet to have the eyelets added. This was from a sheet I posted earlier. I added some Gold Spray Webbing to it (love that stuff!) and thought some bronze beads would look nice.

I like how you can see part of the actual muslin peeking through the darker areas of dye. The stamped images are actually stamped onto sewing pattern tissue and then adhered to the muslin. That sewing pattern tissue just disappears once you wet it. I love the look and the texture! Gives me more ideas to use with my stamps in future sheets.

Now for the new sheets: These were still wet when I photographed them. This first one has some words and images all cut out from one tablet of scrapbook paper. I sprayed it with the Adirondack Spray Dyes in Butterscotch, Wild Plum and then some Walnut Ink:

Here's a second sheet using the same things:

And here is a raw sheet I just made before adding any color to it. I'll let it dry overnight:

All of the sheets I make from now on will eventually be cut down to 3" x 3" squares and embellished before adding the eyelets and wire to assemble the wallhanging. I bought two more huge bottles of Sobo glue and a bunch more muslin. Will keep you posted as the design changes.

Other things in the works: more journal pages, sketches and a few Halloween projects. Now back to work...

Playing With Fabric Paper!

I've been playing with fabric paper again! This is a photo of my first batch that I colored yesterday using spray inks. I belong to the Mixed Media Art Friends Yahoo Group, hosted by Belinda Spiwak. We are doing a book study on Kelli Perkins' book, Stitch Alchemy. This is an awesome book for techniques to use on your base fabric paper. I first learned about how to make fabric paper through the artist Beryl Taylor. Kelli takes the basics and goes a step further, adding different techniques and embellishments. I've made three sample sheets so far. Here is what the base looks like after it has dried and before you start coloring or embellishing:

It's just plain, cheap muslin with snippets of wrapping paper, tissue paper, wallpaper border, scrapbook paper glued down (tons of a Sobo glue/water mixture to really saturate the cloth and the papers). Then a layer of tissue paper over top of all of it. I used strips of plain white tissue paper to cover this piece. Then you let it dry completely. I waited overnight. Then comes the fun part. Embellishing! I used Adirondack Spray Inks in Butterscotch and Wild Plum, along with a couple of swipes from some pigment ink pads in various shades of pink. Here's the result:

I made this next piece much larger. You can see the various patterned tissue papers used here along with the other papers. I also used some tissue paper from some old sewing patterns that I then stamped onto:

Here is the fabric paper with the Butterscotch and Wild Plum colors sprayed on. The plum photographed more of a red color, for some reason. But it is actually more of a purple color.

This piece isn't finished yet. I'm still looking for some more embellishment. Kelli's book is a treasure trove of ideas. Think: beads, collage, oil pastels, etc. for further embellishing!

So what do you do with this? Anything you want! I can see uses in collage, art quilts, mixed media painting, just to name a few off the top of my head. I'm going to make a big batch of it using the same color family (yet to be decided). The book features this really cool (but small) wallhanging that has the fabric paper cut into squares, collaged with fabric circles, stitched around all four sides and then has eyelets along the top, bottom and side borders. The eyelets have jump rings in them and they connect the squares together. My idea is to do that type of thing on a much larger scale.

I'm pulling together the papers today to use for the base. I want to make a nice wallhanging (about 36" wide) for the stairway wall (two-stories high and BARE right now). So I need to make a huge batch of the base fabric paper and get it to drying. I can decide on my color scheme when it comes time to paint the fabric. I also need to figure out how big I want the squares to be. I bought a Crop-A-Dile (on the advice of Zinnia from Hands and Heart) to help with the eyelets.

So, big plans in the works. Always keeping a few projects going makes me feel energized! On today's schedule: getting more sheets made so they can dry overnight and starting on Lesson 2 of LK Ludwig's photo journaling class. Now I'm off to play!