Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Just before Xmas I thought I’d use some left over stiff interfacing (the sort that works well for placemats and coasters). I made some Christmas coasters using some of Bobbie’s foundation paper piecing blocks off her ‘In my garden’ CD.

But I still had some of that 2 mm thick  interfacing left — and lots of fabric scraps from other projects that I’ve been keeping for a ‘rainy day’. Well, it’s summer and hot and not raining, but the heat’s enough to keep me indoors, so I decided to experiment with using fusible web to applique random patches onto the interfacing.

My first experiment was some abstract ‘inchies’, which I first saw on the Feathered Fibers blog. I covered the front and back of the interfacing strip in black fabric, then fused on scraps of colour and did some machine applique using various stitches and threads to embellish them (and hold them down). But the back looked really awful, so after I’d finished the thread work, I added another layer of black fabric to cover the back of the stiching, then stitched in the ditch to hold the backing fabric to the front — I was going to cut it so something was needed to hold the little backs to the fronts.

Next, I cut the strip in two lengthways, then cross cut the lengths into pieces between one and three inches. Finally, I satin stitched the edges with black thread.

Voila! A whole heap of little Mondrian-like inchies! Add a flat magnet and they can be fridge magnets, add a brooch pin and they become fabric jewellery, add a metal loop and they become keyrings…

So far, they’re just inchies! (the photos show little bits of the pins used to hold them in place, in case you were wondering what those funny silver bits were!)

Abstract inchies 1

Abstract inchies 2

Then I went further and decided to see if I could make ‘scenes’ using scraps, fusible web, and machine applique… See part 2.