Sea Foam

I am back to work on my Oregon beach/glass float quilt today. Since I am experimenting, and making a lot of this up as I go, I thought I'd share the process. I am trying to figure out how to make sea foam, using cheesecloth as the base fabric.

Here is my piece of stiffened cheesecloth—see yesterday's post if you don't know what I'm referring to. It is about the stiffness of a sheet of typing paper. I used some Solvy stabilizer dissolved in water to stiffen it.

I set my sewing machine up for free-motion stitching and started stitching little attached circles until I got a nice shape that looked like sea foam washing up on the beach. Then I cut it out and let it soak in some warm water to wash the stabilizer out of it.

Here is what a small piece, washed and ironed, looks like against the float and sand-colored background fabric. It seems to shrink a bit and since not quite all of the stabilizer washes out, it irons up quite crisp, which I think will be an advantage when I am ready to stitch it down. Yes! I think this is going to work. The finished stuff looks quite a lot like lace. I can see that one could use this technique for a variety of interesting effects.

 

Here's a bigger piece.

 

Now I need to figure out what kind of pattern/texture I want for the sand. Here's an experiment on a scrap of the fabric I'm using.