Fabric collage

This was a project started a few weeks ago with some idea of collaging fabrics and techniques together to make a larger piece.

I played around with  Brusho to create a mottled background and then stamped my tree print over the top.

I had some houses that had been printed with a thickened procion dye with mixed results also a large piece of brown fabric that had been dyed after a batik demonstration. All too often I end up with a dodgy sample so this seemed the perfect base for a collage and rather lended itself to a collage based on the large group quilt from last year. The curly lines looked like smoke from the chimney and that was enough for me.

So here is the first layout with cut pieces attached with bondaweb.

In the stocks I had some marbled fabric, not bad for a change, but they needed to do something other than sit in a box so here they are.

I have had a free motion foot for my machine for a while, but not had time to play properly so here is a bit of playing around with shapes and fillers.

I went over the basic outline and then as confidence grew, went in with more detail.

Not wanting to be held up with technical details, if the bottom bobbin ran out I just threw in another colour without thinking about it. It was a good way of using all those odd colours and gave me a rather nice reverse that I could not have planned......I was lucky the tension worked though, could have been a bit of a mess!

So time has passed and I wanted to work on the sky. Leaving the dots and stars and the twirls as smoke I played around with some more stitching and then filled in the gaps with abstract decreasing shapes.

There is a windmill in the top left hand corner too, I had not got a decent print of one so decided to make it very much in the background and a shadow on the the horizon.

I was stitching this last year in the season of the big flood in the UK. Thankfully we were not too affected by the waters that surround us, but the River Ouse rouse high out of its backs and caused great excitement for the children who's playing field was underwater for 2 weeks or more.

So this will be called the 'Near flood of New Bradwell' 2012.