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Saturday, March 31, 2012

Jellyfish Attempt

As you may have guessed from the previous blog post, I was kinda stalling on starting on the jellyfish in my totem, and this was partially because I wasn't sure how to take all the scraps of sheer fabric, yarns and rick-rack shown above and turn it into a jellyfish! I knew I'd probably sandwich two sheers together and somehow get some yarns and other strings to hang down in a squiggly, tentacle-like way between them. But since the background "water" fabric is sheer, I wasn't sure how I was going to secure everything together. When you're stitching onto a solid fabric background, you can just stitch right over any threads to hold them in place. I thought about possibly stitching some yarns onto a white netting, but would I fuse them down first? Pin them? Baste them by hand? Then I remembered that I had some Sulky Solvy water-soluble stabilizer in my stash!
The Solvy is like a thin plastic sheet that can be dissolved in water. I looked through the package instructions and realized you can fuse loose yarns between two pieces of Solvy and then stitch over them to hold them in place!
The stabilizer washes away in only a few minutes in warm water. I did place the yarns on the netting first and then cut most of it away. All in all, I think it's working for me and will make putting this whole totem piece together that much easier! So one jellyfish is done and I've got two more to go...
Some other exciting news: I posted the photo of my stitched button charms (from my previous post) on the Yahoo artcharm website and it was chosen for this week's Homepage picture! Check it out by clicking here!

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