Last week at Creative Stitch one of our members, a talented beader, guided us in a shibori leaf project. When planning we prepared a length of silk to use on one half of the leaf design – a thin strip, wrapped around a bottle and tied tightly with crochet cotton. I’m sure that this is the cheat’s method, but as is often the case, the gathering and preparation of materials needed to be quick! To this wrapped bottle I added three colours of silk paint, watered down to some extent so that the paint soaked through all the layers. I used turquoise and lemon, remembered that I wasn’t doing anything to do with the coast, and quickly added some burgundy!
From this rather uninspiring colour combination came some rather subtle leaf-coloured silk. The colours fade significantly once the paint dries.
A very small piece of this silk was used in the beaded leaf pictured below. I include this photograph as it is so unusual for me to finish a piece like this as I really don’t know what I am doing bead-wise! I enjoyed making it and it gave me the opportunity to do some hand stitching in the evening, although rather a lot of the tiny seed beads have fallen in between the cushions of the sofa! We made the leaf on a vilene backing, cut it out and applied it to a firmer piece of fabric. Mine will then be put onto the front of a book cover and given away as a gift.
JOLLIETEXTILES 