Originally Posted by
feline fanatic
I agree and am also curious. Did you print the photo on to fabric and then thread paint over it or did you start with blank fabric and then trace the geese in or free hand draw them, then do thread painting and ink tense embellishment? Would love to know more about the process as I am sure many of us would. Please come back and post how you went about creating this beautiful piece.
Thanks!
Oh, you guys are all great!! Thanks for all of the super comments.
Now, I'll try to explain the process that I ended doing after many, many false and ugly starts that did end up in the trash.
I used Moda's Grunge fabric for the background water. Then I cut the cattail spears and fused them with Misty Fuse, which does NOT make your needle gum up at all. Love the stuff!! I had to stitch the cattails down to keep them from coming loose while working on the rest. Then, I cut out the shapes of the geese out of a plain white fabric and laid them out on the background and marked their location so I could paint in the shading of the water with Derwent Inktense pens/pencils to get the right effect. These are interesting. You shade lightly with them and then moisten with a bit of water on your paintbrush which then causes the colors to become more intense. Practice with this on a sample first because you can get carried away easily and end up with very dark coloring. Then it was time to fuse the geese to the background...again Misty Fuse. When I was satisfied with the background I layered with Hobb's 80/20 batting and the backing. The threads I used were just some polyester threads used in embroidery machines that I got at a local shop. I used about six different shades of greys and seemed to be changing thread constantly. If I had been willing to wait I would have ordered polyester thread from Marathon. I have used that thread often in my quilting and it seems to really work well. Bobbin, I use Superior Bottom Line. All of the shading on the geese is done with the thread. After all of the stitching on the geese the whole thing looked kind of like a big belly button...the geese looked nice, but the background poofed up all around and I thought, "oh dear, all of this work and it will never ever lay flat. So, using Bottom Line I began the monotonous back and forth to flatten it out. That part was not a whole lot of fun, but it worked. That's pretty much how I did it. Hope this helps.