Vintage Women Fabric Book Pages

I had the pleasure of working in Becky’s book in September, in a theme of Vintage women… and I must admit I had fun playing. :)

My biggest challenge was on how to obtain the vintage images for the book, not easy when one doesn’t own a printer. However, my mate Sue had scanned a few of our cabinet cards and printed them off on her laser printer, so I tried to transfer them onto unbleached cotton using Dylon Image Maker. The instructions state that you need to use a photocopy, but I figured since laser printers are toner-based it might work. And it did. :)

I used a brown suiting fabric as the base for both pages, with volume fleece (quilt batting) in between as per Becky’s wishes. On the first page I painted a nappy liner with Adirondack Colour Wash and fused it onto the suiting and zapped it to distress the liner. I then sponged on some metallic copper acrylic paint.

I did a bit of free motion embroidery along the bottom, and stitched down three parallel ribbons for interest. I then used a piece of printed corduroy from a pair of trousers as the frame for the photo, and stitched the corduroy and transfer down with trim. I added a bit of Pebeo Touch paint in gold glitter around the edges of the gold trim to decorate and make double sure the transfer was secured in place (love the adhesive qualities of this stuff).

The labels were some tea-dyed pieces of unbleached cotton left over from another project that were backed with fusing and stamped using Ma Vinci alphabet stamps and then edged them in Touch to prevent fraying.

The second page is made with the same suiting. The diamonds were inspired by Beryl Taylor’s new book Mixed Media Explorations, or at least one of the designs on the cover. I’m soooo asking for this book for Christmas (hint, hint Joey!). I used a piece of 100lb watercolour paper, washed with gouache, stamped it with waterproof ink, spritzed it with Adirondack Colour Wash, washed it, crinkled it, cut it and glittered it with Craf-T glimmer chalks before sewing them down. I then added some sparkle to the suiting using auburn Glitter Touch. The photo and tags were done in the same manner as the previous page, and added a filigree and gem from Mermaid Tears to finish off the page.

I hope you like it Becky!! :)