Layers of Stitch

I bought a new book, well, new to me because it's been out for a few years. It's called Layer's of Stitch by Valerie Campbell-Harding and Maggie Grey. They do that fantastic surface embellishment stuff that I've been so intrigued with lately. Since I'm doing that postcard swap it's a great opportunity to try out some of the techniques. Now their stuff looks way better than mine but guess that's to be expected when they've been doing it for years and are experts at it. So here's what I did today ...

Here's the basic background layer - I painted some Wonder-Under and ironed to a coarse muslin. Then I ironed some peach chiffon polyester type stuff on top of that. Next I painted a nappy liner - which looks kind of like a dryer sheet but I guess it's used inside cloth diapers - you have to wonder who decided to experiment with using these for fabric work! I didn't actually paint the nappy liner I did a rubbing of a big stamp with an oil pastel stick. Going back to the book I guess I should have cut the liner up and ironed it on in strips to get the texture instead of what I did ... iron the whole thing on in one piece. It didn't seem to make much difference texturally - maybe because I didn't do it properly. Anyhow ... here it is hooped for my embroidery machine ...


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Then the next step was to add stitching. I used the embroidery machine to stitch out the words Posta L'arte - that's the name of our swap group. Next I added lines of blue variegated rayon between the lines of words. Then I started adding all the copper fancy stitching. The book said to add a patch that you embroider so I did that but I don't really care for it. I might need to overstitch it some to blend it into the card more.

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Nope .. didn't like it at all. Ended up taking it off ... here it is without the patch.

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