Surface Design & Why I Love It!

There is something about the words "surface design" that I just love - perhaps because it is JUST so open - so many possibilities!  A few months ago, as part of my gentle re-invigoration of the creative side of my life I joined an ATC exchange that was run by the Surface Design Yahoo Group.  The theme was leaves but was otherwise open to interpretation as long as it involved surface design in some shape or form.  So this was what I did.

Painted a piece of heavy weight lutradur with diluted acrylic paints in shades of green, yellow and blue to make the leaves.   I just adore lutradur (almost as much as paper fabric!)

 Painted, sprayed and then stamped a textured "kitchen cloth" fabric for the background layer of the ATCs.  I bought the packet of cloth for art purposes of course as soon as I saw the lovely woven type texture.  I can't find the packet though at the moment to tell you what it actually is called.

 Created a basic leaf shape template and then cut out leaf shapes from the painted lutradur.

 Used a wood burning tool to melt and shape the edges and to create scored lines imitating leaf veins.

Manually folded the leaves down the middle on the scored line and pinched them until they maintained some "lift"!

Cut the background "fabric" into ATC sized pieces and then machine- stitched the leaves down the centre vein across the ATC.  Decided they looked too plain so melted holes in the leaves (again with the tip of the wood burning tool as this was before I had bought my Versa-Tool) and sprayed the whole lot with some gold glimmer mist.  I guess the impression is that there were a lot of bugs having a feast but they really looked way too plain with the sort of background I had done.

Finished off by backing the cards and zig-zagging around the edges with black thread.  I actually did one more step after I took this last photo and that was to ink around the edges with black ink and the added contrast was an improvement.

I haven't gotten around to scanning all the ATCs I received back in return but Ellen (who is am amazing tatter over in Singapore) has pictures on her blog if you'd like to have a look - there was a lot of variety of colour, style and technique!!