Saturday, February 12, 2011

Making fabric using scraps - a short tutorial.




First collect all the scraps.





Sort them into colour groups - blues and greys, purples and lilacs, reds and pinks, browns with orange, yellow and cream, then the greens. Well, those are the colour groups I sort them into. I also have a bag for multicolour fabrics.






This is the base fabric I shall be using. This time I am using HeatnBond, though quite often I use Bondaweb.
I cut the base fabric to the size I need before ironing on the HeatnBond. Then play around with placing the fabric scraps. This time I am using greens and reds with some purple.





This way I can use up those tiny pieces left over from applique as well as offcuts from various projects. What is so useful is that the oddly shaped pieces from the applique usually still have the Bondaweb adhered to the back. So useful to break up too-large areas of solid colour.





A warning, though. Do make sure the plastic bags get put well out of the way of the iron. This is what I had to get off my poor iron.......... scraps of plastic self-seal bag. Ooops!
You will be pleased to hear that my iron is now perfectly clean and no fabric was damaged in the incident.

A quick post script to the post - I found the HeatnBond I used far too thick for the stitching I intended to do. In the end, I restarted the whole piece using Bondaweb. This produces a much thinner fabric which is easy to stitch through.

2 comments:

RhettaRic said...

Mandy, what will you make out of this fabric? Have you already done something with this technique? I've never seen anything like this before.

Mandy said...

Hello there. I shall be making a project bag for a friend out of this fabric. I have been busily overstitching the fabric pieces since this last post using free machine embroidery.
More details to come in the next post.
I haven't invented this method. It is something I have seen done by others. Its great fun to use up tiny scraps like this.