Monday 15 September 2008

Purple fingers and green nales

Today we'd decided we'd have a burn, shrink and paint day and naturally we took everything ,including the kitchen sink to play with. We had enough stuff with us to cover a trader's stand. In the end we decided we'd concentrate on shrinking plastics and tyvek and try out the Adirodack Colour Spray fabric paints.
Jenny had brought along some samples she'd made earlier and one she'd turned into a beautiful piece for a bag. She only needs to put it together now.
Of course we started the day off with coffee and a long long chat!
Then set up the 'heating' station. Although we all had heat and glue guns the hall only has a couple of sockets. We were a bit concerned about plugging them all into the extensions we brought. We didn't want to short circuit the hall electrics. We decided to set up one heat gun and one glue gun and take turns to use it. Jenny showed us how she makes glue gun swirls and adds embossing powders to them and as she was also the only one with black glue we delegated her as demonstrator.
Meanwhile as each of us made our glue and embossing powder squiggles the rest of us tried out the colour wash sprays. There are some really fabulous colours in the range and can be heatset. We had Lutradur and cotton fabric to colour. The Lutradur was placed on squares on a cotton backing as we knew the spray would go through the holes in the Lutradur. We tried both black and white Lutradur but the black wasn't successful I think you need a thicker fabric paint and probably a lighter shade.
This pieces is where I ended up with purple fingers and green nails - I forgot to put on my ruber gloves!! You can see where we've had the Lutradur but there was enough paint sprayed onto the fabric to cover the space once it was given a brush over with plain water.
Here's Jenny making a black glue squiggle.
We tried the coloured cellophane you get round flowers, that bubbled nicely. We tried both heat gun and iron and checked out the way the bubbles are created depending upon which way up you are holding it.
Black Lutradur background with embossing powder on. The powder was first sprinkled onto bondaweb, heated until it was melted then lifted off. The Lutradur was very slightly warmed and the bondaweb piece placed on the Lutradur and reheated. It went into holes but didn't burn through the fabric. I'm going to try this technique again later. Not got a photo but we painted someTyvek with the colour spray paints. I used wild plum and terracotta and the then heated it with the heat gun. The colours faded and merged into each other but the piece was very attractive so I think this will be used in the future.
We tried several weights of Tyvek; we had mailing envelopes, builders Tyvek and a Tyvek coverall. As expected the envelope shrunk quickest and went into holes (like those in the hand). A couple of these thinner pieces were stitched onto painted pelmet vilene and embossing powder added (purple piece) and reheated.
From the samples we've made today we are each going to make five atc's, one for each of us. It'll be interesting to see just what we all come up with.

1 comment:

Genie said...

Looks like a fun day, I have just used some of my glue squiggles on ATC's