Art Journal: Valerie page completed

Ta da! Valerie's art journal page is now finished. She requested a theme of English cottage gardens and pictured silk ribbon embroidered flowers. This is what I came up with.

The first thing I did was to look around the web for images of English cottage gardens. I wasn't happy until I found this absolutely gorgeous photograph of Di Van Diekerk's silk ribbon work. She's an artist from South Africa and is so very talented ... go check out her work here. She's written some amazing books that I should order because I'd love to learn how to do this one day. In the meantime I reworked the photograph into the warm colors that Valerie loves and printed it on inkjet prepared fabric. Most English cottage gardens are done in purples and pinks and some of those colors still show through.

I did want a bit of silk so I took so hand dyed silk fabric, tore it in strips and made roses using the spider web rose technique on a scrap piece of muslin. I then cut them out and stitched them to the canvas on a layer of some dyed cheesecloth that I had in the scrap bin.

I also wanted to have a 3D fabric "paperdoll" so I made a fairy ... cotton fused to a timtex that's layered, dressed with petals from vintage millinery flowers, edges covered with orange glitter, and a hand drawn face using colored pencils and micron pens. Her hair is a bit of Tibetan lambswool. Her wings are cut from fused Angelina fibers with a glitter outline.

The same quote that I used on Daisy's page is also here, stamped on yellow quilter's cotton and embellished with rhinestones.

The final step was to embellish with random sprinkles of beads, flowers, a glitzy yellow butterfly and a metal dragonfly that was painted with alcohol inks. This was so much fun to do. I can't wait to see my friends this weekend to exchange our pages. More to come later this week.

Comments

[Gerry]

It's so lovely, Tami.

Creative as can be!

hugs

[katieKatie]

Ooooo. Lovely!

[Judi W]

neat, neat, neat!!!