March 21-22 – Stitching Your Passion: A Fiber Accordion Book

Class Description:
What piques your interest: Playing with color and patterns? Preserving memories? Telling your family’s history? Recording your travel adventures? Addressing important causes? Celebrating your garden, children or grandchildren? An accordion “book” made with textiles is a fun way to creatively express what makes your heart sing. 

We will turn 2-D pieces into 3-D artwork that will showcase your passion. We will make “pages” by fusing fabrics (consider what you’ve dyed) or paper (handmade or not) onto a stiff interfacing (Peltex). We can add embellishments that best narrate the themes we explore—anything from the birds and flowers you notice on a walk in your neighborhood to social and environmental issues. 

The front of the pages can be enhanced with stitching, beads, buttons, photos, bits of lace or tulle, ribbons, yarn, small twigs, leaves, coins, and other mementos. Fusing fabric, felt or handmade paper to the back of the panels can hide the stitches. Machine- or hand-sewing joins the panels together so they can fold closed or open like an accordion. Bamboo skewers, fine dowels, knitting needles, or chopsticks will enable them to stand on a shelf, table, mantel, window sill, or pedestal in various configurations like a fiber sculpture. Let your imagination roam freely among the visual and textural possibilities.

Materials List:

1. Instructor will provide a yard of heavyweight stabilizer/interfacing (Pellon Peltex). It comes 20” wide. How many pages you cut depends on the height and width of each one. She will also provide such fusibles as Wonder-Under (paper-backed) and Mistyfuse (ultra-sheer not paper-backed), along with lots of fabric remnants and design samples.
2. Fabric: Depending on the theme of your book, select fabrics to reflect what you’re aiming for. You can also use felt and pieces of weaving, knitting or crochet. If are able to print photos on cloth, prepare them ahead of time; or you can attach actual photos to a cloth background. For a book of  abstract patterns, consider cloth you’ve dyed with indigo, rust, etc. If you want to incorporate vintage-looking items, find fabric lines that contain such elements (words, labels, newsprint, images) to collage with (e.g., Tim Holtz, Cathe Holden). Look through your stash, especially scraps, for what suits your topic or what creates an eye-catching abstract display of colors and designs. 
3. Embellishments: whatever adds to the story or message your book is trying to convey; or you can keep things simple and just add stitching to the fabric.
4. Support sticks: bamboo skewers, knitting needles, dowels, or chopsticks between the pages will stabilize your book to stand upright on a level surface. If your panels are short, they’ll stand up without such support and you simply join them with zigzag or other stitching. The book can also simply lie down instead of standing up.
5. Sewing machine (and its manual, in case you run into a problem), with enough bobbins if you change colors. If you don’t work with a sewing machine, you can stitch by hand.
6. Thread and needles for hand-stitching as well as for machine-stitching around or on each panel. Do you want the thread color to contrast or blend in?
7. Straight pins to hold layers and embellishments in place as you decide on design layout.
8. Cutting board, rotary cutter, and ruler to make even-sized panels.
9. Scissors for cutting WonderUnder (it’s best not to use the same scissors or rotary cutters for paper and fabric because paper has a dulling effect); snips for cutting thread.
10. Your own ironing station (if you don’t want to wait while others are ironing) and a non-stick pressing sheet to avoid stickiness from fusing.
11. An Ottlite if it helps you to see better when stitching.
12. Snacks and water to keep your energy up! And don’t forget your glasses!