Mixed media Butterfly

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.

I then laid this onto some cotton fabric and fastened it into an embroidery hoop.
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.

Mixed Media BookMarks and ATCs with Suzi

Good Day All, Today I'd like to share with you some fun Bookmarks and ATCs I've creating using Brusho Crystal Colour Powders, Koh-I-Noor Polycolor Pencils and some lovely stamps from Crafty Roo Designs.

Here's what I came up with;

Here's how I created them;

I'd previously created a sheet of Background Paper using Brusho Crystal Colour Powders in Gamboge, Sea Green and Alizarin Crimson, I had enough left to create my Bookmarks and ATCs.

For my project I've used the following stamps from Crafty Roo Designs; Chirp, Ewe and Bible Journaling set 1

I cut my backgrounds to size, then punched some 2 1/2 inch circle out of white card stock and stamped my focal images onto them.

As you can see, I stamped onto one of the bookmark backgrounds creating a nice repeat pattern.

For the second ATC I decided to use the Ewe stamp, coloured with Brusho Crystal Colour Powders in Gamboge and Alizarin Crimson.  I painted water onto the areas I wanted coloured, sprinkled my Brushos and left to dry.

I painted all of my focal images with Brusho Crystal Colour Powders and left them to dry.  I also added a little blue and purple to my ATC backgrounds using the leftover Brushos I had on my glass mat.

Once dry I added my elements to the Bookmarks and ATCs and adding some final colouring and shading with my Koh-I-Noor Polycolor Pencils.   I used a Black Fineliner  and White Pen to add thin borders to my projects.

  Here's the finished results in detail;

I love how vibrant the colours are, that's one of the joys of Brusho Crystal Colour Powders they are pure pigment, so you can get really intense colour; add lots of water and you get really subtle colours too, so versatile and fun.

I hope you'll agree that the background papers were far too pretty to go into the bin, and made wonderful bases for these cute projects.

That's all from me for today, 

Happy Crafting and Stay Safe 

Hugs

Suzi

xxx