Dabbling with watercolor crayons
I took a class on how to do free motion stitching and our fourth assignment resulted in a beautiful journal cover. In order to get inspiration for this piece, each of the students in the free-motion class, thought of a feeling or idea. Something a bit abstract. I thought of a few less tangible things such as: cold, glee, confusion, energy, flow and story. Then we took some water based crayons or paints or pencil crayons and interpreted that thought or feeling onto paper. Here is my interpretation of “getting into flow” that I created using water based crayons.
Introducing the textiles
We then took bits of threads, ribbons, fancy yarns and wool roving and recreated our original image. I used a piece of yellow felt as background and then layered my threads and things overtop.
Once happy with my recreation, I pinned a sheet of water soluble stabilizer overtop of everything and took it over to the machine to start stitching it down using my free motion foot (darning foot).
Stitching the design
To stitch it, I tried to copy the swirls of the threads, yarns and fabric pieces that I laid down. I free motion stitched over this many times using yellow, blue and green threads. I wanted to ensure that all the pieces would stay in place after I washed out the stabilizer. Here is a picture after I stitched it, but before I removed the stabilizer.
I inspected it, making sure everything was stitched down, and then I rinsed away the stabilizer in warm running water, and laid it down flat to dry. I was quite pleased with my piece of work. There were many things I could do with it, such as cutting it into bookmark sizes and taping to a paper bookmark, cutting and taping it to the front of a card, or a wooden ornament (you know those dollar store ones?). I decided I wanted to use the most of the whole piece so I found an orange journal approximately the same size, trimmed it to fit, and hot glued it to the cover. I gave it as a gift for my mom. I wrote her a note about how I had created it and she really likes it. I hope she uses it, because I plan to make more 😀
Here is the finished journal.
