Summertime

Well seeing as it's supposed to be summer (we have torrential rain, thunder & lightening at the moment!) I decided to have a bit of a 'play' with the quintessential English summer fruit, strawberries.

I wanted to start by sun printing some fabric and somewhere along the way 'sun printing' morphed into 'mono printing'. Not quite sure how!

Anyhow, I began by mono printing with an ochre colour and when that was dry I repeated the process with a mixed green layer. Not really sure if this is a technique I really like that much.



Having done that I then cut out a strawberry stamp from funky foam and proceeded to stamp over the fabric. Still didn't like it that much so I cut it up to play with in sections.

The first piece I also colour washed with a very diluted green dye mix. Then this piece was laid over some anaglypta wallpaper and fabric pastels were rubbed over it in 3 different colours, pink, yellow and green which I then heat set. Much more pleased with the result, more texture and colour. I then free machine stitched round the strawberries and free machine quilted the background.

Not a brilliant picture, sorry!

The seeds were hand stitched using french knots, a free running stitch and small black beads.

The second piece I colour washed with metallic bronze ink mixed with a little red earth coloured ink, colour washing over the strawberries as well. I then machine appliqued two strawberries over the top, one in cotton and one in velvet.

Once again the seeds were french knots and individual straight stitches.

I still have a couple of pieces that I am playing with. Will maybe blog them later when i've decided what to do with them!