Getting the Work on the Wall ... or in the Hand

There are SO many ways to use your fabric collages! Besides making them in sizes to fit into an art vending machine (if you’re lucky enough to have one in your community), you can hang these little ones from ribbons or give them away in your studio or gallery. The purple square in the photo below is the piece of mat board cut to the size of the collage. I attach these to the backs of the little collages with soft gel medium. It makes a great backing for your business information or a short note, as well as making it a finished piece.

 Frame your work in traditional or shadow box frames.The collages in the deep white frames below have spacers between the art work and the glazing, in this case plexiglass.

The art work below is framed with a mat but without glazing, so that the texture is conspicuous. Many of my fabric pieces are framed in this way, and those seem to appeal to more buyers that the unframed pieces. I also frequently use a frame with glass, especially when my work is being exhibited in shows dominated by other other media, such as paintings.

One of my favorite display methods for my collages is to mount them on prepared canvas, almost always painted to coordinate with the art work. (An example is on the right.) This method is also appealing to potential buyers, as the canvases are very easy to hang. I attach the collage to the mat either with large but invisible stitches or with soft gel medium.









My Pink House collage to the left is hung with a wood slat in a sleeve on the back of the piece with a small holes for nails on each end, all hidden on the back. It is a more traditional way of hanging a fabric piece, and just right for this piece with its irregular edges and homey feel.

These last pieces were hung with simple tabs and small branches, in keeping with the forest theme and natural look. It's a bit tricky to hang a piece with these uneven branches. I had to try out several before finding the right ones, and then made small holes in the branches that the nails slid through.

Just a few of many ways to show off your fabric collages. I'd love to hear about your favorite methods.

Posted by Cris Winters.

Adding the Fun!

SO MANY choices of texture, color, thread, paper, silk, cotton, linen – the fun part when adding the surface layer on fabric collage is choosing the scraps for a particular piece. I like to dump out my scrap bin on the table and rummage through it to find some initial scraps that seem to relate to one another, either by contrasting or coordinating with one another. Then I start adding to the pile. In general, I don’t limit either thin or heavy weight fabrics – a variety is great in most work of this kind.

This scrap selection includes cotton, rayon, and wool challis. I wanted to emphasize pinks that coordinated with each other.

The two collages above include silk, polyester, commercial cotton, inkjet-printed cotton, and threads from upholstery fabric.

You will want to consider the fiber content. Many synthetic or silk fabrics require a lower iron temperature than some of your other fabrics. You have choices: eliminate those fabrics; add them but remember where they are and be very careful when fusing; or go to town and love the melting and distortions that might occur. You can always cover a blooper with another scrap.

Melted synthetic sheer on crinoline backing.

Above is some sheer polyester fabric included in my collage of an old stone building. I included it because I loved the pattern on that fabric. The iron was bit too hot for it, but it melted beautifully to expose the crinoline backing, enhancing the aged character I was looking for.

In addition to fabric, I sometimes include papers and threads. In the piece below, I used a page from an old book that I had stamped with pink flowers, yellow-green paper with stamped ginkgo leaves, and a piece of scanned hand-written text that was inkjet printed on cotton, along with a variety of cottons with interesting shapes.

The process of constructing fabric collage in this way is a real creative challenge with lots of latitude and a huge learning component.


Next time, I'll share some of the numerous ways I've used these fabric collages.





Posted by Cris Winters.

Fabric Collage: Supporting the Art(s)

Top to bottom: crinoline, canvas, heavy fabric

Beneath the beautiful colors, patterns, and surface are the supporting cast of fabric collage: the backings and the fusing materials. I almost always use one of three types of backings for my collage work - canvas, crinoline, or heavy fabric. My experience led me to the conclusions in this table.

BACKING TYPE	PROS	CONS
canvas	several weights, very stable, easy to find, relatively inexpensive	harder to sew with hand stitching
crinoline	translucent, light weight, easy to sew through with hand stitching, relatively inexpensive	harder to find, less stable
heavy fabric	easy to find, many color options, often free, ease for hand stitching varies	stability varies

Each backing type has it benefits and draw backs. If I plan to do lots of embroidery on a piece, I fuse it to crinoline. If I’m just going to frame the piece without edge stitching, it’s finished. But if I want to finish the edges with satin stitch, I might fuse it to canvas after I’ve finished the hand work for more stability. I tried fusible nonwoven stabilizer a few times and didn’t like the feel of the collage. It also seemed harder to do my hand embroidery on these pieces.

Crinoline over patterned fabric showing translucency

 

Back of piece with canvas backing

I have experimented with several types of fusible products. For larger pieces of fabric that don’t require hand stitching, I have used spray fabric adhesive with success. Normally, I use a paper-backed fusible, such as Wonder Under, because of the ease of not requiring another nonstick ironing sheet. I often apply the stabilizer to a larger piece of fabric than I might use immediately, so I have some prepared scraps on hand. One problem with this type of fusible is that on light weight fabric, the fusible can darken the right side and even show a slight pattern if it’s present on the fusible surface. Misty Fuse is best in such cases, and in general is a great all round good choice.

Next: my experiments with various fabric and paper choices in collage.

Posted by Cris Winters

Ta Dah!

So if you saw Wednesday's post, you know that I had a bag of about 30 tiny fabric collages to work on in the car. Was hand embroidery really going to do much for them? I just started in without overthinking , and soon I was loving the challenge of figuring out the right colors and combinations of stitches to make each little rectangle really pop.

 

 I finished embroidering all of them before our trip was half finished and started finding other things to embroider.  I was addicted by then!

The last section of my trip was the SAQA conference in Arlington, VA and I needed lots of business cards. Complications with internet service as we traveled prevented me from getting cards made via an online service. Instead I made a digital collage of the images of 2 dozen of the little collages I had made, printed them at a Kinko's, and cut them up. Fun cards - 24 different designs.

When I finally returned to my studio, I edge stitched each piece then satin stitched over that. The final step to prepare them for the art vending machine was to glue a piece of mat board with my personal information on it to the back of each tiny collage. I kept a few of my favorites and sent off the rest to be included in the vending machine at its 2014 summer home at the Wild Center in nearby Tupper Lake. Here are some of the completed collages.

Well, that's my story of the tiny collages for the art vending machine. But it's just the beginning of what I did with the pieces I kept and the collages that resulted. As the month proceeds, I'll have more posts about techniques, materials, and processes with fabric collage.

Posted by Cris Winters

The Best Part

 So, I had a couple of the fabric collages fused together. Next I began stitching over the surface of the collage with my machine. My goal was to secure the scraps where I had loose edges or fraying areas, as well as to provide some overall texture and color. I used lots of my fancy machine-generated stitches, especially in areas where they would be highlights. I reduced the foot pressure so I could easily make circular and loopy lines of stitching, in between straight stitching. Then I added some free motion stitching. Best to do that as a separate step, to avoid having to reset the feed dogs too often.

 

Straight, decorative, and free motion stitching

Finished collage sheet with fabric, decorative papers, book pages, and digitally printed fabrics

So, I had a couple of sheets of fabric scrap collage all stitched. The clock was ticking, my suitcase was nearly ready, my stops along the route were secured. By this time I had conceived of adding a bit of hand embroidery to the little pieces. I love to embroider in the car (especially if someone else is driving :-) and this was a great excuse to get going with it again

Travel embroidery kit - nice clear zippered sections. A repurposed toiletries travel bag.

 Almost time to leave!!! Back into my studio to get all this into a container for the trip. So, I flipped the collage sheets over, marked the correct dimensions for those little art machine boxes with a Sharpie, and started chopping.

Marking the back of the sheet and cutting

 When I collected all the little collages and turned them over, I was astonished! So many of the pieces were such lovely little compositions! I couldn't have done better if I had planned each one.

The whole collage sheet all chopped up.

I scooped up all the little pieces, dropped them into a zip lock bag, grabbed my embroidery kit, and hopped into the car with a sort-of-a-plan! See you again on Friday to conclude this particular tale.

Cris on Fabric Collage

Cris Winters here, with my first post of my guest month on the Fire Blog. I thought I’d tell you the story of a recent experience with fabric collage that changed my art practice, changed what I displayed and sold, and obsessed me for months! I’ll tell you more about myself as we travel through the month of June together looking at lots of fabric collage techniques and materials.

And another thing. I have a lot to learn, so if you want to add tips of your own to what I present, please pitch in and send your comments!

I’ve been doing fabric collage for a while. It was a natural progression from the paper and mixed media collage I did as my regular art practice for few years. Last spring, though, it became a Whole New Thing! I was asked to make a couple of dozen pieces of tiny art about 2 ¼” by 3 1/4 “ for our community’s Art Vending Machine – a refurbished cigarette machine that now dispenses art that fits inside little boxes just the size of a cigarette pack. Great fun!

But I was leaving on a very long car trip in a couple of days and the art was due a couple of days after I returned. Yikes!!! After my initial alarm, (instead of sensibly saying “NO!”) I went into hyper-creative mode doing what I love best: making art with serious constraints placed on it. This time the constraints were 1) small specific uniform size, 2) must be made in multiples of 12, 3) some way to do at least some of the work as I traveled, and 4) relatively short time frame.

I remembered reading several articles about using fabric scraps to make beautiful collage pieces, so I dug out a couple of those to refresh my memory on the basics. I had some medium weight canvas lying around, so I ironed some paper-backed fusible on it and got out my scrap box. (WARNING! Using fabric scraps in this way DOES NOT reduce the amount one already has. Instead, the scraps somehow breed in the closed container such that one has to continually find larger containers. I think the alchemy comes about when one feeds them all kinds of other bits and scraps that never seemed to have a purpose before.)

I proceeded by ironing the scraps I planned to use and arranging them on the fusible-covered canvas. My pieces of canvas were about 12” by 20” – that size was convenient to work with, especially as I did my machine stitching in a later step.

I assembled the collage on a Teflon sheet and transferred it to the ironing board by sliding a quilting ruler underneath and moving it carefully. Then I covered the whole collage with a second Teflon ironing sheet and pressed it all together. 

There were some inevitable gaps that revealed the backing, so I added fabric (and some paper) scraps that were already fusible-backed from other projects. I also added some scraps that added to the color, design, or general interest.

See what happened next in Wednesday's post!