The First Mixed Media Painted Fabric

A talented friend of mine, Cheryl Prater, is writing a book with another wonderfully talented gal, Debbi Crane. These brilliant women asked my sister Deb and I to submit a collaboration piece for the gallery section of their new book. I am beginning the collaboration by creating the base, this is a detail of what I have done.

I had such a blast doing this, it is very loosely painted compared to most of my work. I started with a piece of plain fabric and collaged a page from the phone book, some sewing pattern tissue and a few old black and white engravings then randomly added textile paint. I drew a branch with a black marker and grabbed the pearl paint painting big flowers by covering the background around them. I loosely drew details on the flowers with a black pen and cut out leaves from colored papers and glued them on with gel medium. Then I stitched around everything on the sewing machine. It was so much fun to work in a spontaneous fashion with only a vague idea of what I was going to end up with.

I will now send this to my sister to work her magic with further embellishing and altering.

Here is what Deb has done to the piece.
There are fabric birds with antique foil wings, paper butterflies and eggs. rubber stamped designs white on pearl, french knots on the flowers and more. This photo is just a detail of a much larger piece that has been sewn into the form of a utilitarian garment for Cheryl Prater and Debbi Crane's new book.