Mar 28, 2007

My New Embellisher!

Woohoo! Happy birthday to me, my husband got me an embellisher for my birthday! I think he was so relieved to know what I wanted, the price did not sink in right away.

Here is a picture of my new "baby":


I could literally play on this thing all day, but I have to get ready to leave for a week of vacation with my family, so I only got to do a short test drive. Basically this is a machine needle felter. There are 7 barbed needles, but no thread. You are sort of "meshing" together layers of fabrics with the needles.





Here are some samples I was playing with. I was using as the background the leg left over from a jeans purse. The blue/green stuff to the left is the scraps of silk from a tie bag I made. On top of that I put some green wool yarn. To the right are some little butterflies and dragonflies I cut from a piece of cotton batik fabric. The yarns on that side are cotton and a polyester blend.












Here is a picture of the machine in action!






So all of the test samples seemed to work out fine, and the denim was about as heavy a fabric as I plan on using, so I thought this made a fine test drive. SO I decided to make a quick little bag that I could use on vacation to test how the embellishments will hold up to use. So I cut more of the motifs from the butterfly batik fabric and made this bag:

...and the back has some test yarn:

Update: The embellished part of the purse held up great through the entire vacation, but the strap was not stiff enough and got all wrinkly...

1 comment:

me, Mavis said...

Very interesting! I have to say that I didn't know at all what to expect ... now I want to see it in person. The bag looks adorable!