Cup of Tea Anyone?

Hello everyone, I hope that you are keeping warm, and looking forward to longer, lighter days to come. As you read this post, I will be at Hochanda with Lesley for two days of TV shows, I hope that you will be able to catch the shows, as we have some lovely demos and great products to share with you. The Design Team have made some beautiful samples again this month.

For my post today, I am sharing some projects that I demonstrated on last month's Anniversary show on Hochanda, using the fabric panels. If you caught the shows, you will have seen these samples during the afternoon show. My first project was unfinished at the time, and I have now made it into a useful book cover, and I thought I would share a few photographs with you. Katya is from the set of 3 Ladies fabric panels.

I coloured the fabric panel with tea first of all, dipping the whole thing into a bowl of the warm liquid, and gently squeezing out the liquid, and letting the panel dry. You can decide how dark you want the panel to be, by dipping the panel more than once, or leaving it to soak a bit more.

Once the panel was dry, I coloured the image with Inktense pencils, and blended them with a waterbrush, to give a watercolour effect. The whole effect looks very vintage, which is exactly what I wanted. I like the blotched effect that the tea has given, as if the fabric is old, and has been in storage for a long time.

I created a book cover by adding some felt wadding, and two pieces of contrast fabric to make a 'sandwich', using a journal as my template. I turned the ends in to make the inside flaps, and hand stitched those in place. I really liked this red floral fabric, as I felt that it created a folk art feel to the project.

I will be able to reuse the cover once I have finished with the journal. The wadding makes the cover feel very luxurious. Katya's headdress would be fabulous for embellishing with beads and lace, you could really have lots of fun with this image. I have left it fairly plain, but why not have a rummage through your stash and see what you have that you could add to create lots of texture?

My second project is a canvas bag, from the Timeless set of fabric panels, that I showed as a finished example on the show. I had already coloured the Steampunk image with Inktense pencils as before. The panel had been dipped in tea, but I had created a lighter finish, which teamed up with the canvas bag perfectly. I used a blend of pencil colours to create a stone and metallic finish, so easy when you are colouring. I used green, orange and brown for the metal, to give a rust-like appearance.

On the bag itself, I used a couple of stencils, Tando Mini Cogs, and Chocolate Baroque Mask- Kaleidoscope of Butterflies to create a background. I used Inktense pencils, colouring through the stencils, and then used a waterbrush to spread the colour. I placed a piece of paper inside the bag to protect the reverse of the bag while I was working.

I decided to outline the butterflies with a permanent marker for a bit more definition.

I simply hand stitched the panel to the bag, but could just as easily have machine stitched it to the bag. I hope that you have enjoyed my projects, and reading about how I put them together. I will be back later in the month with more projects to share with you, thanks for stopping by, xx