Welcome! Well, Fall is definitely in the air here. My son started school today, and the days are getting noticeably shorter. My to do list, on the other hand, is NOT getting shorter! I'm guessing that I'm not the only one trying to shake off Summer mode and burst into action.
I've been working on the new MFT Release, among other things; and one of those "other things" is an Oriental Poppy Bouquet Kit that Imagination International sent for me to experiment with. I enjoy playing with paper, but where arts and crafts are concerned, I'm an equal opportunity explorer: I like cloth, paint, glass--you name it, and I probably like it! Besides having some lovely batik printed cloth in the kit, the real crux of the kit is a spray fabric stabilizer solution called Terial Magic. Terial Magic prevents the cloth from fraying and allows it to be manipulated (cut or die-cut) more like paper, leaving clean edges. It's not that stiff, however; I've used some fabric stiffeners in the past that made the cloth so hard that it didn't feel like cloth any more! Terial Magic isn't that stiff, but it does absorb into the cloth so that you can get nice clean cuts.
I knew that I wanted my poppy to fit on a card, so I decided to use a poppy die set that I already had rather than making a large poppy by the provided pattern. (My die set was a Shapeabilities Create-a-Poppy). The Terial Magic made it pretty simple to cut my shapes, even though the shapes were detailed. I ran the cloth through my die-cutter four times for each plate of cuts, just to make sure that everything was cut through. I still had to snip a few threads, but not many; and the cuts were very clean. (I found that the very detailed cuts, such as the leaves, worked best turned with the grain of the cloth rather than diagonally or biased--so the stem on the leaves lay along either the warp or weft, but not at an angle to it, for cleanest cutting results. On the larger pieces like the petals and centers, it didn't matter a bit which way they lay on the cloth.)
Shown above are most of my parts after I die cut them, I've already attached the petals to the bases of the large, medium, and small poppy layers. I Googled Poppy Images before deciding exactly what I wanted to do with the poppy center, so you might well make a different choice, depending upon the poppies that you like best. All of this cloth is from the Terial Magic Oriental Poppy Bouquet kit, and I still have the majority of the stabilized cloth left for more projects. I have about half of my small bottle of spray left as well, even after spraying almost all of the cloth in the kit.
You knew that I really wasn't capable of NOT using at least one Copic marker on a project, right? :-) That center needed darkness, where a poppy looks like it has inky stains. I used my Copic N4 to flick medium gray from the center radiating outward.
After looking long and hard at those tiny die-cut leaves, I knew that they were really too small in scale to work well with my poppy. So I freehand-cut two larger poppy leaves that I liked the scale of better.. (That wasn't hard. I simply folded my stabilized cloth in half and started whacking away--like you would freehand-cut a valentine or paper dolls.) Also, can you see how much more ruffled my poppy looks in this picture than in the previous one? It was a little flatter than I wanted it after I glued it all together, so I gave it a second quick spritz with the Terial Magic and bunched up my petals, then put them into a small plastic cup--the size that comes on the lid of cough syrup and holds maybe a Tablespoon of liquid. I let it sit in that cup until it was almost dry, and than I took it out, fluffed it up a bit, and hit it with my heat tool to re-set the Terial Magic solution.
I paired my cloth poppy with some MFT Stamps products, including that Peek-a-Boo Polka Dots Die-namics, a banner from Blueprints 25, a sentiment from Essential Sentiments, and background "spatters" from Distressed Patterns. Clearly I won't be able to shove this card into an envelope and mail it, but it's for someone whom I don't mind paying for a small Priority Mailer box to encourage. Sometimes life just takes you outside of the envelope. . . ;-)
Tomorrow's another opportunity to whittle down that to do list, right? Hang in there--you can do it--and maybe I can too! Thanks for stopping by today,
