Saturday, November 28, 2009

Beaded Tower Book


If  by any stretch of impossibility, you are a fibre artist and haven’t connected with Maggie Grey in the UK, you need to do so. She has a number of books in print and they are all unusual techniques and fabulous inspiration. http://www.workshopontheweb.com/ or on her blog, http://magstitch.blogspot.com/


With the purchase of her book “Textile Translations”, published by D4Daisy there are on-line lessons offered for an extra project.
http://www.d4daisy.com/maggiete.htm 

I started this one last spring and had a lot of fun with it. The faces and “head dresses” draped around them are wet paper, applied to Timtex,
 http://www.ctpub.com/showproducts.cfm?WPCID=1117 and then painted over with gesso. From there I inked, painted and dyed until I was satisfied with the shading. I was unable to make the technique offered by Maggie Grey work….probably because our inks are not the same as those produced in the UK. But with a little bit of experimentation and a great amount of serendipity, the project came to life.


The best part was the beading. I sat with my husband watching TV and started beading. It went well. I beaded evening after evening, going from one piece to another. I would do something to one piece and then decide the other needed more and then….well, you get the picture.



I had originally planned to have fabric pages with the verses applied with Steam A Seam Lite, a fusible stabilizer which works with fabric or paper, but the fabric didn’t work as intended so I switched to decorative papers. These worked well. They are stitched together, and then “bound” to the cover so that they ruffle nicely when the book is standing. I’m quite happy with the way it turned out.







As always, the next one will be the best one, but I sure had fun playing with this one!

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