New Work from Paper Fabric

Though the children are still home, they are feeling better (yahoo!), so I left them a bit for some studio time. Yesterday, I had quickly adhered some fusible to the muslin of the paper fabric and cut out some shapes. Today, I put it all together, did some quick quilting and bound it. Here's what I learned from my experiment with paper fabric:

1) I did something wrong way back at the beginning. My paper fabric dried very stiff, not pliant as described in the article. (Cloth, Paper, Scissors: May/June 2009 issue, Kelli Nina Perkins).

2) The glued paper separated from the muslin, both on the big piece and on the smaller pieces I tried to cut out. Again, I'm sure this is user error, but I've got to figure it out. It was very frustrating to go through the process of swiping the muslin with glue soup, only to have to re-glue everything after it was dry. Thank heavens I kept my design relatively simple.

3) The muslin / paper combo was very thick. That rendered the fusible on the back somewhat useless.

4) Receipts aren't the only things that turn black when exposed to heat. It appears that anything with a somewhat waxy coating will ... like movies tickets.

5) I struggled with finding a suitable background for the piece; I confess that I'm not too keen on this one. I think for my next rendition, it would be interesting to have a piece of rusted fabric in the background. (Another thing to try!)

Despite these hiccups, I'm really intrigued by the possibilities of using paper fabric in my artwork. I'm going to explore this further. In the meantime, here's my first piece with this technique; it's 8" x 10". I'm not sure it's finished yet, but it's close enough to post.

Comments

i like it a lot, the hand that is. i think the hand is lovely, the background fabric....hmmm... i have some rusted fabric you could have!
Vivien
This is very cool...I think it is just terrific that you didn't give up even when things didn't go by the book.