If you have seen my Insta feed recently you will have seen the pictures of butterfly in my garden, including one landing on my foot. They are the inspiration for this mixed media post where I use free-machine embroidery with fabric paint.
I remember a lady at one of my free machine embroidery workshops being really surprised when I said I wasn't good at drawing. Art takes so many forms, and to be an artist doesn't mean you have to be good with a pencil!
So to help me, I found a non-copyright image of a lovely butterfly (American Monarch Butterfly, Danais Archippus to be precise) and printed it onto soluble paper.
The paper not only guides my stitching but adds stabilisation for the dance black free machine stitch I added.
I lowered the feed dogs on the machine and used an embroidery foot. The butterfly design gave me a guide for stitching.
See this in action
Once the black was stitched, I ran the fabric under the tap and the paper dissolved.
Whilst the fabric was still wet I used fabric paints to add colour to the butterfly with a fine brush - lemon yellow and gold.
You may remember that last month I made a screen from Tyvek Paper. Tyvek paper makes a great stencil and I used my Tyvek leaf stencil to sponge on a delicate leaf green.
I then used a foam brush edge to add some gold fabric paint.
Once the design is dry, iron fix the fabric paint on a hot setting for 2 minutes or bake at 140°C for 4 – 5 minutes.
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