Life has got in the way of embroidery

over the last few days, but I did manage to do some. These are samples of ‘leaf litter’ for the 3d piece. I also did some leaves but they are not ready to be revealed to the world yet.

On Friday I got distracted into following up Thursday’s lesson on transfer techniques – although I’m still not sure what the point of it was.

In class we discussed techniques like ‘prick and pounce’ and tacking for transferring designs, and then used some dreadful smelly stuff to transfer photocopies of our designs onto fabric. This is my effort – but as you can see it is pretty blurred [and it still stinks!] Fortunately I had chosen a fairly simple image: those who tried more detailed pictures were very disappointed. I suppose the learning that took place was not to bother with this stuff, the name of which I don’t know!

We also tried Dylon Image Maker, although as I had some at home I left that till Friday, when I got sidetracked into trying most of the transfer techniques I could think of – all the stuff you buy on a whim and never use, or techniques you’ve read about and never tried. Most of these were more successful than the smelly stuff.

I won’t show you them all because they are colour variations on the same image but I can tell you that I printed onTyvek, calico on freezer paper, tissue paper on Bondaweb on its backing paper and Craft Vilene with no ill effects – although the latter had to be put through with care not to jam. This is the result on Vilene.

However if you do the same it is at your own risk!

As usual, I printed onto the wrong side of a transparency in an attempt to try to transfer from it onto fabric. I shall have another go at that today. I used t-shirt transfer paper which worked well, and I also want to use transfer paints and crayons.

All of this seems to have moved a long way from where we started, how to transfer a pattern to fabric for further embroidery – but it has been an interesting journey!