A Jarful of Fabric Candy

I recently discovered that my favourite key holder was well past its best, and decided to make myself a new one. And while I had my fabrics, iron and sewing machine out I figured I might as well make a whole batch for coming needs. I put them in a glass jar, to cheer myself up in the darkness of late October in Finland. It's like a jarful of fabric candy.

Here are some of them in close-up. I like to use my own hand-dyed and surface designed fabrics in combination with linen.

Now I just need to get enough key rings to finish them.

Thanks for dropping by, and see you again soon!
- Annika

Fabric + Paper = Paper Fabric

I've been preparing a weekend course on how to make paper fabric and how to use it, and today I want to share some of the things I've been working on. Earlier examples of when I've played with paper fabric can be found here and here.

Here's a collection of "raw" paper fabric - that is paper fabric which hasn't been decorated with paint and stitch.

See the one in the middle, with a poppy shape? It's made with papers that I used to clean my stencils after printing poppies and fake script (for this project). Nothing goes to waste! :-)

I've made several kinds of purses, e.g.

and

The red paper fabric in the background later became a notebook cover:

By adding a bit of padding and a soft lining, you can make a cute eyeglass case:

And if you don't like sewing, cut it into strips and weave it into a little basket. The one in the background is made from birch bark, and the other one from paper fabric. Pretty neat, huh? They have a very similar feel to them.

There's just so much you can do with paper fabric! What a great way to recycle some of the paper that you have lying around the house.

Thanks for visiting my blog, and see you again soon!
- Annika

C'est Parfait

My latest experiments with the Emo dyes have been parfait dyeing, but without ice cubes (which I blogged about here). The first version wasn't a great success (I will add images later after the fabrics have been dried and ironed), but the second version, which I whipped up tonight, looks more promising. Yum!

Thanks for dropping by! Stay tuned for the results!
- Annika