Inspired by students

I've been facilitating another adult class this term, entitled "Picasso's Playgroup for Adults". Our last few weeks have been spent pouring paint onto paper through filters, such as cheesecloth, coffee filters, diffusing paper, yarn, and more. It has been a wonderful experience, seeing the results of everyone's experiments. I was inspired to try something similar with fabric, layering tissue paper and cheesecloth on fabric and then pouring and spattering watered down acrylic paints over the entire works. The acrylic "glued" the paper and cheesecloth to the fabric, which I expected. Yesterday, I took my fabric oil pastels and worked through stencils to add some more texture and finally ran the entire piece through the sewing machine with mulit-coloured thread. The results are seen below:

Entire piece:


Detail:

I was then faced with a conundrum -- what to do with the resulting piece of cloth?

Today, I decided to transform the piece into another doll. The fabric, though, is quite stiff now that it has all those layers. Sewing the body parts went OK, but they were difficult to turn right side out. I've actually had to take the hands apart to turn them right side out, which means that I now have to try to sew them back together from the outside and hope the stitches will be strong enough to cope with the stuffing process that is to follow! Good thing I had decided on a rather threadbare look to the doll (with the cheesecloth, it is hard to do anything but threadbare)!

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