Bootfair Finds - Alice in Wonderland

If you're like me, you get a childish glee out of bootfairs and charity shops. The trick, I find, is to see the possibilities in the objects there; as they are, they might be useless, or grubby or ugly, but what would they look like if you added a little paint? Some fabric? Took that painting out and created a collage?

With that in mind, I took out a selection of old glass bottles I had bought (for £3 the set) and looked at them, waiting for inspiration to strike. I especially liked the flatter, clear rectangle bottle; I could almost picture someone trapped inside. Following this whim, I traced around the bottle and sketched a little figure reaching as if trying to escape.

The figure quickly became Alice in Wonderland, because that would explain why she was so small (if she had drank the shrinking potion) and also because it is an easily recognizable character with a striking design.

Once I'd drawn her, coloured her in, and outlined her in black pen, I cut her out (carefully). I left a little rectangle below her feet; when bent at a 90 degree angle, for those of you who played with paper dolls will recognise, is a stand.

Because she was made of paper, it was easy enough to roll her slightly to fit her through the neck of the bottle. I had to finagle around a little bit with a chopstick because she was facing the wrong way, but I was really pleased with how the size turned out.

This label was a piece of card I cut out into a pentagon and wrote "Drink Me" on, like the potion in the story. If you are looking for interesting fonts to copy, go to www.dafont.com and explore their selection for inspiration.

So go ahead, see what fun finds you can dig up at secondhand stores and give new life to! It's great if you can make something completely different and unexpected, and even if it goes wrong you've not broken the bank on an expensive piece of art material!

Free-Motion Quilting

Free motion quilting differs from embroidery because you are stitching on a quilt sandwich rather than a single sheet of fabric. This can be done after creating a quilt top or patchwork piece, but I started here with two blank white rectangles because I wanted to experiment with paint.

When quilting, one of the key things to remember is that your wadding must be BIGGER than your fabric. This is because the quilting will make the wadding shrink and pinch in odd ways, and you don't want to be left with a corner of your finished quilt without wadding.

I sketched a design by pencil onto the top of my quilt sandwich (fabric-wadding-fabric) before I lowered the feed dogs on my machine and began to sew following the lines I had sketched. I think it is a good idea to sketch an idea first to get a feel for how to move the machine to follow lines and circles, especially when you're new to free-motion.

I wanted to experiment with using stitches to create stencil-like effects when painted over. By sewing the same area over and over, parts of the fabric will bunch up around the stitches to form interesting raised areas.

I especially like the way the circles worked out; by sewing around the circles again and again I got the fabric to raise up in quite prominent bumps. This is great because when working with paint (fabric paint or otherwise) you can use these prominent bumps to create marks, similar to Batik resist methods.

I chose to use Inks rather than paints, because I have run out of paints and so there wasn't really much of a choice. I do really like, however, how the inks have mixed and blended on the fabric. Inks don't give quite the same affect as paint, because paint is less porous and thicker, meaning it sits on the fabric where you put it, whereas ink will run off and bleed quite far. This did sort of ruin the intended effect of having crisp white lines of sewing between the coloured fabric lumps, but instead the lines are more akin to tie-dye.

You can see here how the cotton thread took the ink differently to the fabric; I liked how with one ink on these two materials you could get a whole range of different colours. Maybe using hand stitching would create a different effect?

My favourite bit of this little experiment was the back cover surprisingly. Where I had layered the stitching heavier in one area than others, the ink bled through easier to the back. By doing this, you were able to get a reverse stencil effect, where the shapes are seen much more clearly but the predominant colour is the white of the original backing fabric.

Maybe you could try and experiment with creating free-motion quilted pictures where the picture is revealed on the back side after painting or dyeing?