Tuesday, April 27, 2010

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.




9 comments:

  1. Oh, that is very clever! Thank you for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks good to me, Terry!

    ReplyDelete
  3. The seafoam looks terrific. How clever! I wonder if you colored over coarse sandpaper it would give a good texture?

    ReplyDelete
  4. And you didn't want to try Angelina fibers? LOL Looks very cool. I am feeling very behind on doing a quilt for Oregon SAQA. Yikes.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You are some clever lady. Amazing process.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is very cool. I work with cheesecloth a lot but haven't tried this one yet. I think it will work really well in this piece.

    ReplyDelete
  7. My dad told me to nevey play with seafoam because it was covered with scurvy...Your seafoam looks much more beautiful then scurvy-covered seafoam!

    ReplyDelete
  8. This is beautiful! I have been hand dyeing some silk gauze and wonder what that would look like with this method. Very interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Liza Eastman3:59 PM

    Hi! a year after you seem to have put your seafoam photos up I went looking for photos of sea foam because yesterday I drew up a beach sea sky quilt and wanted to confirm the shapes of the bubbles. I have intended to use wash away but will try your technique with cheese cloth which I had not thought of although I use it quite a bit for some things.Thank you Terry.You can find some of my work at www.virtualbay.co.nz/lizaeastman if interested

    ReplyDelete