Fun Summer Class

Last week I helped teach a teen camp at the Craft Guild of Dallas. The class was called "Bag it Up" -- a week of making exciting new purses. There were 4 very talented young ladies in the class. My classes were on making a felted ipod or phone bag (more on this later -- they were so cute and I want to show you guys how we did it). We also made "fabric paper" purses. This purse idea came from the book "Stitch Alchemy". Basically you create your fabric paper by starting with muslin, then gluing on tissue paper and any other kinds of paper you might like. We also used some of my lightweight silks. Then painted, stamped, journaled on -- whatever! This is a good summer project as it is very freeform and fun.

These are the fabric paper purses before the girls added more embellishments:

Here are the girls with their finished purses:

Great Shibori Class

I attended a fun class in San Antonio with internationally known shibori artist Doshi and the San Antonio Fiber Arts group. (www.doshifiberart.com) If you haven't encountered her work or shibori in general, it is so amazing. Basically the fabric is tied or clamped to create ornate patterns then bound using fairly fine string, and dyed. The string or clamps and the folds of the fabric form resists and pattern the fabric. The origins of Shibori come from century old textile traditions from Japan and Africa.

Here is one new shibori technique I learned: pleat a light weight piece of silk up around a rope -- the rope should be about 1" in diameter. Wrap a piece of string or thread around the silk to bind it to the rope (you end up with sort of a tube around the rope). Die with either MX dyes or acid dyes.

Here is a picture of a piece of fabric created with this technique:

Can you see the pleat lines?

Also, a great book on the subject is "Shibori" by Karen Britto.

Beautiful Work!

I've had the privilege of having Jane LaFazio use one of my "everything kits" to create a finished piece. She will be teaching a tutorial on this process next week (June 16) so watch her blog!

Here is the link and a picture of the piece she created:

http://janeville.blogspot.com/2010/06/burgundy-glow.html

Isn't it beautiful?

I will have some new kit colors over the next few weeks as I start carrying the prefelts and rovings as separate items.