Anne’s Creative Threads

A couple of weeks ago I got a copy of Cindy Walters’ book ‘More Snippet Sensations’ as I wanted to try out her technique for creating pictoral quilts. I have experimented with this technique before to create leaves in several of my rain forest designs. I have tried a number of different methods including using powdered glue which was set by using the iron; it was effective but messy and I ended up with sticky scraps of fabric all over the place and not just in the area of the quilt where I wanted them. In this method the fusible web is applied to pieces of the fabric before it is cut up into small snippets so I thought it would be better.

In the photo you can see my pile of  fabric scraps and the photo taken on a recent jungle trip, which I used as my inspiration for the design. I never through any of my batik scraps away and keep them sorted by colour in clear plastic bags. I drew a basic outline of the forest path design on my backround fabric and then started applying the tiny snippets of fabric starting off with the lightest and most distant leaves.

Distant leaves and tree trunks, the design starting to take shape.

I used a pale grey fabric for teh background as I wanted some of it to show through as sky, but it meant that I had to cover the rest of the design very densely. I think next time I will use several fabrics for the background, roughly pieced so that I don’t have to cover it with so many pieces. I used tweezers to position some of the tiny pieces and when I was happy with the arrangement , fused them in place.

The finished design with borders added and a few leaves and plants spilling over the edge. The quilting will have to wait a while as we are away for most of December having a holiday in the Philippines, so I’ll be writing about that rather than my sewing for the next month.