Fossils piece continued.

I have been putting silk roving (or whatever it is called) into loosely curled shapes and then laying some water soluble fabric over the top. I copied the design onto the soluble fabric to assist me in the sewing, my freehand sewing is not that good.

I tried some in a hoop. At first I didn't put the soluble fabric from side to side but that wasn't entirely successful, I needed pins to hold it in place.  So then I did two at once in the hoop. 

 I cut the extra soluble fabric away before washing it as I didn't want the piece to be too stiff. The soluble is relatively difficult to get rid of entirely and does change the hand of the fabric.

 Here it is dried out. I used chiffon for the background piece, then a layer of silk hankie (not an actual handkerchief. I think it is a cocoon pulled out into a flat piece that has many layers and then you can peel those layers apart for really thin pieces of silk).

 Then I decided not to use any background fabric. I just laid out the silk roving and put it between two layers of soluble fabric. It might have been easier to use the see-through soluble but I don't have any and I do have a reasonable amount of the other. I am still trying to use up my stash.

I was going to try to sew one without the soluble fabric as it does get flattened and stiffer but the thought of all that loose silk under the needle seemed too challenging. So that experiment can wait for another day - or another life.

Anyway, they are coming along. I just have to work out how to attach them to a background. And make the background first!

This one is quite small, it is lying not the floor beside the heating, drying. 

It has been enjoyable playing with the ideas. Also, because they are all separate pieces, they can easily be discarded, or used differently, if they don't work out properly.