Gathering

I started off by practising gathering pieces of muslin, using a machine.  I used elastic thread and practised a single line of gathering and then three rows, which gave a smocking effect.

 

 

I then experimented with hand stitching, gathering different fabrics:

 

 

Inspired by a photo of Mt Fuji, I took from a plane, I painted a small watercolour and then added some gathered muslin to create a textured surface to give the effect of fluffy clouds. I frayed the edges to emphasise the fluffiness.

 

 

 

Liking the effect, I gathered a piece of dyed cotton to see if I could create a texture to represent the reflection of the walls in my cave photo.

 

 

Folding and pleating

Folding and pleating is a technique I have used in shibori to create textures fabrics.  I will be writing about this in the next post on ‘Raised and structured surface textures using shibori techniques’.

Here are a few samples of pleating:

 

 

 

I wanted to see if I could represent the lines from an image using folding and pleating and selected a photo with lots of lines.  First i drew out a plan of stitching and then gathered and folded a piece of muslin:

 

 

Tucking

A sample using tucking