It's not a forgiving medium

I’ve been working away on my piece made from single use plastic bags. This is from an online class with Natalya Khorover that I took last week. It was a pretty complicated process to create the artwork. If you are familiar with reverse appliqué then you will have an idea of what I was up against. How about creating an entire piece with reverse appliqué?

Here’s an idea of the process. 

• Put down a piece of the Pellon stabilizer the size of your finished piece.
• Place a piece of white plastic on top of that. 
• Then place large pieces of other plastics of the appropriate colors where they fall in your image. So you have a hot mess of a bunch of plastic pieces. Almost looks like a collage of plastic. 
• Cover this entire mess with a large piece of plastic to keep the smaller pieces in place. 
• Pin your sketch that you have created on tracing paper on top of the plastic sandwich.

 

 Stitch along all the lines in your sketch. Then tear off the tracing paper.

Cut through the different plastic layers to reveal the color of plastic that you want for the different parts of the image.

 

The cement works in my original photo was an abandoned and worn out site. My plastic piece looked too new and cartoon like. So I aged it with brown Staz On ink and started really “quilting” the piece.

 Here’s where I am with this now. Still more machine stitching to do as well as hand stitching. 

So why is this unforgiving? 

• You cannot take out stitches. Once you make a hole in plastic it’s there forever. I’ve had plenty of times when quilting a quilt where I started quilting and did not like the thread color or how I was quilting it and ripped it out and started over. Couldn’t do that here.
• You cannot really mark where you want to stitch. I tied using blue painter’s tape to  mark with. When I took off the tape it also tore off the plastic. 
• It was too easy to cut through the wrong layer of plastic. 
  

Will I do this again? Not sure. There are so many mistakes in this piece it might be worth doing another piece on a different subject just to see if I can avoid them!!

Linking to Nina-Marie. 

http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading. 

Chris