Flights of Fancy.

Our craft group exhibition theme this year is 'Flights of Fancy' so I looked up the definition: an idea which shows a lot of imagination but which is not practical or useful in real situations.
Who ever follows the theme anyway?!
I'm making a start on my fabric book and I guess it's going to be flowers, birds, butterflies, dragonflies - things like that - but from my imagination.

I've been looking at my new book 'Under The Cover' by Frances Pickering and she suggests starting off with an 'Ideas' book...well I already have collections of stuff that I keep and have ideas for!

One of the things I kept was a plastic bag from 'Oasis' thinking, 'I'll use that someday'. I liked the butterflies and flowers on it. Now I'm colouring them in with my Sharpie pens and the new acrylic inks.


After 'Ideas' comes 'Covers' and I think this plastic bag might just make a cover for my book so I've been doing a bit of sampling.
I coloured in a butterfly with Sharpie pens then fused it to my fabric with Bondaweb and a hot iron.
It bonded well to the fabric and I thought I could stitch on this.

I  was surprised when I peeled the plastic bag off the fabric  -  the Sharpie ink had transferred on to the fabric but also remained on the plastic. Two for the price of one.

I painted some yellow acrylic ink to the wing of the butterfly (below left) and liked the colours.. the yellow  rose in the centre is acrylic ink and gave a good print too - they seem to work better with Bondaweb.

So after my bit of sampling I'm thinking I could colour in my Oasis bag and fuse it to fabric, then I can stitch on it to make a hardwearing book cover.  I can also cut out individual flowers and butterflies from the bag to make small prints inside my book.
The next step is to experiment with some background fabrics and see how they look when the coloured plastic bag is placed over.