Wanderlust: fabric collage

Series: Wanderlust 2021 #22

The idea this week was to recycle old clothes, possibly adding in something a bit meaningful at the same time. Of course, we had a clear out last year (it did all go to recycling) and the only thing left was some denim I had saved from my other half’s old jeans. Luckily, I did also have some cotton fabrics left over from when I used to make hammocks for our ratties.

The butterfly image transfer onto a scrap of old sheet worked quite well, especially as I was using an inkjet-printed picture rather than a laser print. The gel medium is a bit obvious around the edges, but that’s mainly because the cotton was off-white.

I’m never sure about pockets on art journal pages, but this small one did work to balance the page nicely and gave me the opportunity to bring a little of the red from the top down. The booklet is just a few scraps of my collage papers stapled together.

Once I’d got all the pieces cut to size and come up with an arrangement I was reasonably happy with, I cleared my desk, got out my sewing machine for the first time in ages and sewed everything together. Only when it was all assembled did I decide that it needed a bit of white for contrast and had to sew the white stitching through all the layers — apart from on the pocket of course, that was a bit fiddly, which is obviously why I added so many stitches there… The last things I added were the painted silver dots around the butterfly to balance the silver sequins on the white lycra.

Tiffany fixed her finished piece into her journal as a separate page, but that involves cutting down two pages to create strips that the edge of the fabric can be sandwiched between. I chose to keep it simple and grab some wide strips of double-sided tape to stick it to a page instead.

I think that, with hindsight, the only thing I would do differently would be to either make the edges more tidy and square or make it more ragged and uneven. At the moment it looks a little scruffy. But other than that, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

Class:

• Wanderlust 2021
• Theme: recycled
• Teacher: Tiffany Goff Smith (website, Instagram)