Lady in a Forest Dress - Part Two

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of a lady in a Forest Dress.

I worked on the moss and greenery components.  For the moss, I layered snippets of fabric, yarn, wool roving, thread and trimmings on top of tulle.  This was topped with Solvy and sewn in a grid of green thread.  When it was complete, I soaked it in water and let it dry overnight.  In the picture below, you can see that it is airy and somewhat transparent.  It will get cut and placed on top of other components, perhaps even solid green.

Some of the tiny components fall apart as it gets handled, but that's OK.  I like the 3-D effect of the "moss".

The next components that I worked on were the 3 tiers for the lower part of the dress.  I layered some of the same items on these too, but they started with a layer of fabric, fabric blobs, and then all of the snippets of fabric, yarn, wool roving, and trimmings.  These layers also got thread, some shiny doo-dads, and were topped off with tulle.   I made sure to work from light to medium to dark in each of the 3 layers.  When they were done being quilted, the edges were turned under and glued in place.

I made the sleeves and pinned them in place.  The sleeves and dress layers were all stabilized with a lightweight stabilizer.  I plan to insert some branch-like things as well as the moss before it all gets sewn to the background.

I also found a face on the internet that I posterized in grayscale.  You can see that it is pinned in place on the pattern.

I hope you like it so far!

25% recycled Green Quilt, Part Two

After letting the mossy log, er field of lettuce,  simmer for a few days, I decided that I had to back up a little bit and tear some things out.  Ripping out is sometimes called un-sewing, and there was plenty to edit out on this piece.  I took off all but the three center pieces of the log.   That helped a lot.

Then I made some sheets of moss in various color ranges.  It was so fun to lay down recycled and re-purposed stuff.  I used dyed cheesecloth, dyed trim, ribbon, moss, wool roving, dyed goat hair, painted color catchers, thread, snippets of fabric, and lichen.  There were two wash away stabilizers used; one for the bottom that is normally used for embroidery, and clear Solvy on the top.  I tried stitching willy nilly on one piece, and did a purposeful grid on another.  After dissolving top and bottom stabilizers, it was clear that willy nilly doesn't work that well.  A lot of the pieces dropped out in the sink!  So for all the rest of the pieces of man-made moss, I went back to the grid system and added enough free motion thread work to capture all the little pieces in the thread net.

Here are a couple of pictures of the man-made moss, which was made in different shades.

There were a lot of pieces of green fabric that were placed in the background with a layer of tulle on top.  This still didn't look right, so I switched the orientation of the piece, and now plan to make it into a mossy tree in the Northwest forest.   Now I need to remove most of the dark background and get some light into the piece.  Hmm, maybe some branches and little trees to give the feel of the forest and give a sense of scale.  Stay tuned.