The Complete Photo Guide to Textile Art by Susan Stein

I am so excited about the new book out by Susan Stein, The Complete Photo Guide to Textile Art!

It is more than two hundred pages of surface design and embellishment techniques, accompanied by some of the best photos I have seen in a fiber art/surface design book! Translation: Informational Eye Candy!

I decided to take a few of the techniques shown in the book and use them in a completed piece.

The first thing I wanted to try was her technique for discharging with bleach. It's almost looks like shibori done with bleach.

  Discharging Dye, page 28 from The Complete Photo Guide to Textile Art by Susan Stein (Creative Publishing international, 2010)

I used some plastic I had lying around, it was the red plastic for wrapping gift baskets in. I would not recommend using this plastic if you are bleaching on anything other than black, because the color on it does begin to come off once the bleach is applied.

Here are my pieces with the plastic layered on:

Then I sewed using different zig zag widths:

Then I decided to also include some free motion stitching:

The freemotion stitching is NOT easy to take out after the bleaching. However, I remedied this situation, by trying another piece using water soluble thread on the back side (not the plastic side.) By the time the bleaching was getting done, the water soluble thread had disintegrated, leaving the plastic to easily come off, along with the top thread. I also tried parchment paper and freezer paper, and found both to work just as well as the plastic sheet. A bigger needle in the machine also helps.

The pieces turned out very neat:

Then I started with another technique:

 Angelina, page 94 from The Complete Photo Guide to Textile Art by Susan Stein (Creative Publishing international, 2010)

Here is my result:

I think it turned out quite pretty!
 
I stitched the angelina piece onto a background. I simply stitched a quarter of a inch inside each side of the angelina piece. Then, I realized the orange background was just a tad too plain:

 I decided to add one more technique from the book to it:

Discharging Dye, page 29 from The Complete Photo Guide to Textile Art by Susan Stein (Creative Publishing international, 2010)

I used a pretty foam stamp of a fern and used the discharge paste here and there on the piece, before quilting the background.

Let it dry, then steam it with the iron:

 Then I simply quilted it, put the binding on and it's ready to go!

I even started another piece with some more of the discharged fabric:

I still have to finish the quilting on the blue part, add some embellishments and bind it.

I can't wait to try some more of the techniques in this book!


From time to time, we'll be focusing on new books, and new products out in the fiber world. So if you something you want to see on here, or YOU have something new let us know about it, and maybe we can do a feature on it here!

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