Nearly everyone that I asked told me to make a winter scene for the final Garden Lady in the series. She is going to be #10 and I'm going to name it "Winter Interest".
I found a digitally generated design that I liked on Pinterest. I tried very hard to find the artist who was the source of this pin, but couldn't find it. Dang it. I really want to give credit to the originators of my ideas. It was pinned by Anouklaga, who has pinned many artists on her pages. It is a very sweet and fitting end to my series of Garden Ladies. It'll be a challenge to make so many wings!
I traced it and had it enlarged at my favorite blue print shop in Portland. For this piece, I decided that I would definitely start with the wings. I like wings to be transparent and so organza was the obvious choice for the fabric. I made wings for my second Garden Lady the same way, which was to layer 2 pieces of organza between dissolvable stabilizer, draw on the veins, stitch it around the edges and along the veins, soak it in water, and press it into shape. I found a couple of sheer fabrics at JoAnn's and decided to layer 2 different ones on the wings. Here are the 2 fabrics, which I know are hard to see in the photos. One is iridescent shimmering, and I put that one on the top.
This was laid down on my cutting table.
The next layer was Aquamesh, a product from AES.
Then the two layers of sheer fabric. And finally, the top layer of Solvay. I traced the pattern onto the Solvay with a permanent ultra thin marker (this gets washed away!).
I pinned it all in place then removed the freezer paper pattern from the back. I used gold metallic thread in the top and the bobbin of my machine and zig-zagged on top of all of the drawn lines.
The next step was to cut around the outside of all of the wings, leaving a scant 1/4" from the stitching.
It got soaked for a few minutes to dissolve the top and bottom products, then laid out to dry, ironed, and placed on the design wall on top of the pattern.
I hope you like it so far!
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