Tuesday 17 February 2009

Waste Not Want Not!

A little while ago a friend and I decided to have a go at making a small wall hanging using the Alicia Merrett method of curved piecing. So rather than delve into my stash of 'good' fabric' I decided that this was the ideal project to use up all the scrap pieces of fabric that are too small to be used in anything but a scrap quilt but were perfect for trying a new technique.

This is the almost finished piece that has been quite heavily quilted. I had added a bit of felt applique to one section with the intention of adding more. However, I decided in the end that I didn't really like the appliqued piece and would remove it at some point. Also, because I had used up scraps of fabric the colours were very hit and miss and it didn't all tie in together.

Over dying the whole piece seemed the best way to bring all the different fabrics together. I chose a red dye, popped the whole lot in the washing machine and crossed my fingers! Actually,I was quite excited to see how it would come out.


Over dying dulled the brightest colours and tied it all together a bit more coherently. However, it did nothing for the felt applique and turned the green stem into a dull dirty brown making it look worse than ever before. My solution to this was to cut the whole thing up!

I cut it into 4 pieces following the seam lines already present. I discarded the piece with the applique on it as I really didn't like it. I turned the centre piece round, rearranged the other pieces and re cut the edges to match each other. They were then bound and the binding was pulled round to the back before being stitched down so as it was not visible. I was then left with a large area of blank fabric that needed to be filled with something!


I cut a tree stencil that would overlap two of the pieces and used fabric pastels to fill it in. Once it had been ironed to set the colour I then stitched a broken running stitch round the edges of the tree and stitched in the 'knots' with a little more detail.

I think, for the minute it is finished, but you never know. Maybe I'll come back to it and tweak it some more!

2 comments:

dot said...

looks great, can't wait to see it in the flesh.

Val said...

Hi Mandi - this looks really good now and very red! Thanks for dropping by my blog - been a long time ......
Have a great day with Dot - give her a hug for me. Val