Fractured Architecture

A group of us are now starting a new project. The original is a line drawing of the canal houses in Amsterdam (or a reasonable facsimile thereof!). There are ten of us and we will all do the 10 different houses. Then the hostess will swap them out so we all end up with one of our own houses and one of the houses from everyone else!! And it is a large project. 33" high and somewhere around 70" or more wide!!! I could hardly wait to get started.

There are five main components for the background. Working my way down from the top -- the sky, the house, the sidewalk, the canal wall and then the canal. There is also a bridge in the middle with houses on it also. The only really important parts that have to match are the sidewalk and the canal wall. And there will be one fabric that will run throughout each house. The hostess dyed it and sent us all a piece. Somewhere in each house there has to be some of this common fabric. That will help tie it all together in the end.

So, to begin, I've been playing with techniques for some of the background or base pieces. I have some sky, some canal wall and some canal.

This is a piece of woven fabric for the canal wall. Each strip is 1/4" wide so this could make a wall for several of the pieces if needed.
OK, so I'm now addicted to woven fabric!!! This is a piece for a couple of skies

This is a piece that I pleated (rather irregularly by hand) in parts and left other parts unpleated. Then I stitched with metallic thread to reverse the pleating. I think it makes great current or perhaps slight waves from the wake of a boat!

This is a technique I've seen but never tried before. I have a 1/4" grid cookie rack that I used to poke the fabric through for this piece so the "bricks" are apx. 1/4" square. If you ever try this, I found it much easier to keep the already poked parts from coming out when I poke in the area next to them if I sprayed it with spray starch before poking! Then I ironed MistyFuse to the back of it to keep it all together and so I could add it to the slice of canal wall somewhere in a couple of houses. Or, perhaps some of it will end up being a roof or something..... We'll see.

It's good to be back on the computer and able to upload pictures and a lot of other things!! More tomorrow!