Inspired by Buda

I have been playing around with using synthetic fabrics to produce a stained glass window look.  My current work is based on the Buda Historic Homestead. They have a Contemporary Textiles Award that will be on in June.  I think it is biennial.  There are even workshops in the intervening year in which you can visit the house and gardens and be inspired.  I was unable to go last year, partly because I wasn't sure I would want to participate - that it way too much planning ahead.  But my friend and I did visit recently and took lots of photos.

After going through a lot of my images and trying various ideas, I have come down to using three images of glass in or around doors in the house.

What is rather tricky is developing your own image when you are inspired by something in the house, as is part of the brief.  I have taken part of the etched glass image and part from the designs above and put them together in my own design.  But it is hard to say it is totally my own design.  This idea of being inspired by someone else's work is very tricky.

Stained Glass Window Effect

I have been playing around with some ideas for a design based on stained glass windows.

As I wanted it to be translucent, like stained glass windows, I used polyester organza.  I layered the pieces and pinned them to a piece of dissolvable fabric on which I had drawn the design.

I then free motion sewed the outline and cut away the layers.  That wasn't quite as easy as it sounded, the layers were hard to see at times and I did nick a couple of layers that I had not meant to cut through.  I also decided to do some lines on one part but forgot to do the cutting away before I sewed, so there is a colour in there that doesn't see the light of day.  Oh well, that is the advantage of doing a small test piece.

I didn't do it in a hoop and I found that it shrank by about a centimetre.

Here it is, in front of a window so you can see how translucent it is.

The plan had been for it to be 15cm x 15cm, so I left the area around the sewing to make it closer to the size I had wanted. It is not very obvious in this image but there are a lot of fibres waving around, the fraying of the polyester.  I quite like the effect so am not going to do anything about it at the moment, especially as it is just a sample.