Unusual materials

Most often I use commercially produced cotton fabric for my pieces. I generally do not wash the material first. I like the sizing in the fabric--it produces a crisp finish when ironed (although it does build up on my iron which is annoying.) Sometimes, though, I use other fabrics for different effects. Here is one of my favorite excursions from the cotton fold:

Here is an entirely non-cotton piece. The black background is a heavy black linen--quite substantial. All of the colored fabric is felt. Some of it is wool felt which I happened to run into at JoAnn's one day. The rest is polyacrylic. So much fun to work with!

In this close-up you can see that I embroidered the felt prior to sewing it down. I wanted a real indigenous look to the piece so I used various embroidery stitches for the applique. I also used some off-white felt cut with pinking shears as a border around some of the pieces.
That's all for today. Hopefully I'll have something new to post about soon--