Small steps…

some of them very small.

I decided I needed some fluff in the corners of my drawers – I’m sure none of you have fluff in your drawers, but I do in mine. [No, not that sort of drawers!]

How to make fluff? Felt and an embellisher. I know you can use dryer fluff, but as I don’t have a dryer …

It felt silly just embellishing felt on its own, so I experimented with layering the felt on brown paper, sure the paper would just disintegrate.

But it didn’t – well, not straight away –you can see the beginnings of some disintegration bottom right, but I had to embellish from the paper side to get it to do that.

 

 

I don’t think I’ll be using this technique  for this piece, but the effect is interesting.

Other bigger small steps are:

finishing the itsy bitsy button bags [here in the wrong drawer] -

 

 

 

 

and the layers of rubber bands – now I have to pluck up the courage to fit it to the drawer -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and adding some handles to the chest – doesn’t it look distressed? -

 

 

 

and turning lots of ‘string’ [or string-like substances such as macramé cord] into machine cord.

I have bitten the bullet, taken out a second mortgage and, as advised by Ruth Lee, bought a cording foot – and it does make making miles of machine cord easier – the cord doesn’t get flattened, but because the feed dogs are up it doesn’t wiggle all over the place.

The next step is to sample various processes for making loops with this – crochet, wrapping and binding, buttonhole rings – or anything else I can think of.

As an alternative, I want to sample ways of filling a drawer with bubble wrap – anyone got any bright ideas apart from ironing it?

And finally, I retrieved this from its perch on top of a radiator – the bowl I made from the left over brown paper pulp. It has dried very hard and crunchy – I wish I’d made it before I handed in the 3D samples, it looks the perfect receptacle for unidentified archaeological artefacts – after a bit of distressing, of course…

When the weather gets warmer I want to experiment with making hand made paper with brown paper, too.

Mmm – is that one step madder than cutting up fabric and sewing it together again – shredding paper and making paper with it?