Let's experiment in play? Sue Chisnall-Sumner May Meeting 2016

This month we welcomed Sue Chisnall-Sumner and her friend Caroline who arrived with a well packed car of goodies!
 Sue enjoys working with mixed media and she brought some finished pieces [see below] and a lot of samples to inspire us.

Sue informed us that the day would be split into working with three different "non-woven textiles" lutrador, tyvek and kunin felt. We would be exploring the properties and possibilities of these fibres.
Anything which needed to dry was done in the morning and so we started with painting transfer dyes onto paper so that we could colour the lutrador with them by ironing when dry.

 Sue demonstrated using paint through a stencil onto the dyed lutrador, adding embossing powders and then applying heat so the lutrador distressed and the embossing powders reacted to the heat. 

We were then shown how to use the stencils on kunin felt by scraping paint with a card adding 3D puffpaint and embossing powders. The samples were then distressed with the heat gun.

We had to keep a close eye on the felt and lutrador when applying heat so that we produced something lacy and were not just left with a blob!

Our last fibre was tyvek which most of us had enjoyed playing with but never used in an embroidery. Sue suggested painting both sides of the tyvek and then free machining to a base piece of material in a flowery organic shape. Excess tyvek was to be removed and then heat applied which produced a much more sympathetic look as the stitching stretched the holes apart.                                                      

                                                    

It was a good fun day and we took home a lot of samples and also the knowledge of how to use these materials in the future.

 Thank you to Sue for inspiring us and to both Sue and Caroline for organising the tables products etc and keeping everything tidy and clean.