My first attempt at fabric collage and free motion stitching!! It is really somewhat of a disaster but I kept over stitching until everything was held into place!!! I used a white light weight base fabric, pinned on my green fabric scraps and then stitched a few lines to keep them in place. Once the whole thing was covered with scraps I started free motion stitching. I have never done this before so it was trial and error. I broke my first needle and was having tension problems all the while trying to figure how hard to press on the pedal and how fast I should be moving the fabric and in which direction. Having read up on FMS I was aware that my first attempts were not going to be fabulous. Even accomplished people need to warm up before they can do good work. Reminds me of calligraphy - no matter how accomplished it still requires some warm up before you work on a good project. So anyway, much thread later I have a piece fabric collage that is lumpy and frumpy and needed a serious pressing. It looked a bit better after that. I trimmed the edges of my piece to be even and ended up with a piece 9" x 16" so I cut it up into 3" x 4" triangles which will become trees for Christmas cards!! I will need to embellish them a bit and come up with a card design but I am on a roll!!
My inspiration for this experiment was a library book my daughter brought along when she visited a while ago, called SEW WILD which contained lots of funky and interesting fabric collages. I was working from memory as to how I was supposed to proceed. On hind sight, I am thinking that most collages would be created using fabric scraps backed with fusible webbing. That would keep them in place but you do not get any texture from the frayed edges, etc which I enjoyed on this piece. So, I will try again. I really enjoyed the process and am happy to have found a use for this piece.
Therese
