Melted Doodles

After making a heap of abstract textiles pieces based on cell imagery and microscopic biology I decided I wanted to make a series of more figurative pieces.

If you visit my Cell Structure Textiles Page you'll see the more abstract pieces that inspired this one.

I wasn't quite ready to let go of the cell structures and I had a background in costume- so it seemed natural to make a bizarre pollen-based lady.

I think if I made this piece again, I'd have the female figure curled up in a pollen cell or at least some sort of more dynamic pose. I think I might have something to say about hayfever!

In case you didn't realise- the textiles piece below came from the doodle shown in the introduction.

Before I made Roots I mainly made pieces that were really squishy and quilted because they were sewn on top of wadding (batting). With this piece I decided that I wanted to make a piece that you could turn around and look at the back. I wanted it to be slim and flat - and to tell the truth, I'd probably run out of wadding to use.

This piece has net for a top layer- I normally use organza because I think it looks a lot nicer and shiny whilst net kind of looks a bit cheap. However the net looked great on this piece.

This piece originally started out as twice the width but half way through I decided it would be more fun to try to make a narrow piece. I also decided that it's better to have two pieces to experiment with rather than one large piece that you might mess up.

Click here
to see what I made out of the other half!

I used a lot of paper in this piece as well as fabric.

This is another piece that isn't yet finished. I'm not sure what to do with it because I made it so thick it's now impossible to sew through it either with a sewing machine or hand stitching! I think I might work at sewing bits to the top layers, rather than all the way through.

Anyway, this is a textiles piece I made based on a story I'm working on. I guess the book is so stuck in my head that it's all I can think about.

If you're both crafty and like writing you might find that the two things help each other out. I've made objects from my "book" before to help me get past problems in the plot and writers block.

I think I'd like to work into this piece with embroidery threads- that might give it a little more "oomph".

These doodles were some of the first bags I designed.

I haven't made a bag in so long and I miss it. I'm going to have to make some more soon.

The doodles above were inspired by beads from the book "Making Beautiful Beads".

In the bag images below you can see how much I love making bobbly bags.

I found this amazing image of a mitochondria and I knew I had to make a model of it.

Originally I started trying to make a separate "wobbly" shape to go inside out of cloth- the pattern was really difficult to get right and it wasn't working.

I decided that I'd made a 3D structure instead- wrap it up in a yummy pinky, purpley textiles piece and then for the outside I'd use organza as a "thin membrane".

I love Autumn!

Below in the textiles piece you can see how much this piece developed by the time I finished.

Find a breakdown
of this project on Folksy here.