Starshine Salon

Steampunk Chic Fabric Cuff

You can make the perfect fabric panel for your sewing projects by stamping on fabric! For this Steampunk Chic Fabric Cuff, I used the largest image from Sin City Stamps' Time set. 

I stamped the image with ColorBox Chalk Ink in Warm Violet onto tea dyed muslin.  Tightly woven fabric gives the clearest image. I like Chalk Ink, but India ink works well, too.  I heat set the ink with a hot iron.  For more tips on stamping on fabric, read this post.

You can see that the image didn't come out clearly all the way around.  Sometimes you can get a clearer image by putting a piece of craft foam under the fabric, but this result was perfect for this project because I wanted a soft look.

I gathered a few tea dyed doilies to consider as possibilities for the base of my cuff.  I wanted to make an extravagant cuff, so I chose the large lacey one.

I folded the doily in half, then pulled the top layer back a little bit to reveal both layers.

I planned the length of my focal section to make sure I could stitch it to the fuller portion of the doily.  If you stitch your panel to a weak part of the doily, the whole piece will be weak.

I wanted the panel to have finished edges, so I added a seam allowance when I cut it out.  I cut out a piece of plain muslin the same size.  I decided to add a little ruffle with a piece of silk sari ribbon.  I pinned the ribbon to the right side of the printed panel.  I didn't measure the pleats for the ruffle.  I just marked the halfway point and then folded the ribbon over to make the pleats.

Then I pinned the plain piece of muslin to the top of that and stitched all the way around it with my sewing machine.  You can leave an opening for turning, but I like this method when it’s okay for the back to have a slit.  After stitching all around, make a small slit in the piece that will be the back, and turn the piece through that.  You can stitch it closed, or leave it as is if the back won’t show.

I added the gears to the panel. 

These were raw brass gears that I treated to add a little patina.  I learned this method from Brenda Sue Lansdowne of B'Sue Boutiques.  I adapted it a little to use the items I had on hand.  I washed the pieces with warm water and soap to remove residual machine oil from the manufacturing process.  Then I soaked the pieces in a combination of water, white vinegar and table salt for an hour.  Then I removed them from the mixture and put them in the oven at 450 degrees for an hour.  When they were cool, I rinsed them off.  You can add colorants at this point, and seal the pieces, but I left these the way they were. 

Each gear has a hole in the center, so I sewed them to the panel the same way you would sew on a sequin.  Bring your thread up from the bottom, go through the hole of the gear, go through an anchor bead (mine are brass), sew down through the hole of the gear.  I did that twice for each one and then knotted the thread on the back. 

Next, I pinned the panel to the doily and stitched them together.

There are many different closures you can use for a fabric cuff.  For this one, I chose a large snap because it was simple and I did not want to overlap the ends of the cuff.  I put one side of the snap on each side of the doily, and when you snap it together, the edges of the doily drape down.

I hope you will make your own fabric cuff.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

Starshine Wishes,

Karen

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Stamped Fabric Bird

I wanted to make some spring vignettes with birds in different types of nests, but I’m not crazy about the birds at the craft stores.  I had decided to make some out of fabric but hadn’t drawn the pattern yet when I received the Clocks & Birds stamps from Sin City Scraps.  I love the birds on the plate and decided to try some more stamping on fabric to make my birds.

You can get the whole unmounted plate of Clocks & Birds for $19.  Then all you have to do is cut
it apart and adhere each stamp you want to use to an acrylic block with double sided tape.  The bird is also part of Bird Trio, which sells for $8.

I have a tutorial about Stamping on Fabric, but here are the basics.  If you are making decorative items that don’t need to be laundered, you can use the same ink you use for paper crafting.  Chunky stamps work on lots of fabrics, but if you want to use a detailed stamp, like the bird I used, you want a smooth, closely woven fabric.  The finer the threads and the closer the weave, the better impression you will get.   I like to use cotton muslin.  The piece I chose for this project had been tea dyed and then dried in the dryer.  If you aren’t tea dyeing, you may want to wash, dry and press the fabric before you stamp.  This removes the sizing the manufacturers put on the fabric and draws the threads closer together.  If you don’t like the prewashing idea, just go ahead and try stamping on the unwashed fabric; it will probably work just fine.

I stamped my bird on doubled tea dyed muslin with Colorbox Chalk Ink in Dark Brown.  Sometimes it helps to put a piece of craft foam under your fabric, but in this case, I got better detail by stamping on a hard surface.

I cut around the image and turned the fabric so the right sides were together.  You can usually use either side of muslin as the right side, but you want to make sure your stamped image is turned to face the second piece of fabric.

You can use any color fabric and any color ink, but this particular combination had the advantage that I could see the bird image through the fabric.  This allowed me to stitch around the image without having to draw an outline.

I stitched all the way around.  I used a presser foot that allows me to sew a ¼ inch seam.  For a small, curved project like this, you want to use a very small stitch and turn your piece often.  You want to backstitch at the beginning and end, to secure the stitches.  I put my stop/start point at the bottom of the bird because I thought that was the least noticeable location.

I trimmed my seam, clipped all the curves and trimmed close to all the points.

Traditionally, you would stitch most of the way around, leave an opening, stuff the piece, then sew it closed around the edge.  You’d be stitching along a curve and the piece is very small.  So here is my easier method.  I use this for lots of projects.  Stitch all the way around, then cut a slit in the back of the piece:

Turn the piece right side out, pulling the fabric through the slit.  Use a dowel or knitting needle
or the end of a paintbrush to push out the points, taking care not to poke through.  It helps to have a slim but blunt end on the tool you use.  If it’s wrinkled, you can iron it.  Inks can react differently, so I always put a piece of waste fabric over any ink I’m unsure of.  I don’t want it on my iron or my ironing board cover.  But I didn’t need to press my bird.  If you heat set the chalk ink with an iron, you could color it in with ink or paint.

I used polyester fiberfill to stuff my bird.  For a small piece like this, you want to pull out small tufts of it and use your tool to help you get it through the slit.  Fill the far corners first.  Then compress it by pushing with your tool.  Some brands of fiberfill come with a little wooden tool that really helps. 
If you are using a knitting needle, using the back end can help here.   Just don’t stuff it so full that
you can’t pull the fabric together at the slit.

When you’re happy with how it looks, stitch the slit together with thread that matches your fabric.

Your bird is finished!

I imagined my bird as a Steampunk Magpie, building a nest in an empty clock case and stealing little gears and watch parts to fill it.  I colorized an empty metal clock case with Vintaj Patinas.  I used Marine as the base, then added a little bit of Verdigris and a tiny bit of Jade.  I applied the patina with a small paintbrush, and when it dried, I rubbed a piece of fine steel wool around the top of the clock case to give it a worn look.  I colorized some gears to match.  I filled the “nest” with some silver bullion, but you could use wire or twigs or fibers, too.  Then I added my gears and some little watch faces.  Nothing is permanently attached, so I can use all these items in future projects, as well.

If you don’t have an empty clock case, you can use a little grapevine nest from the craft store.  I
added a few gears to this nest, too, in keeping with my Steampunk theme:

And if Steampunk is not your style, you can use anything you like for a nest.

Romantic?  Here’s a little teacup nest:

Shabby Chic? Here’s a nest in a vintage tin:

Vintage?  Here’s a nest in a vintage woven purse:

With a little shredded paper, Easter grass or dried Spanish  moss, you can make almost any container into a little nest for your stamped fabric bird!

I hope you will try stamping on fabric, and I hope you will visit Sin City Scraps to see these beautiful stamps!

Please let me know if you have any questions about this project!

Starshine Wishes,

Karen

 

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Sin City Scraps Steampunk Hummingbird Card

Sin City Scraps Steampunk Hummingbird Card

Sin City Scraps has a great plate of rubber stamps called Clocks & Birds.  It has nine stamps for only $19.  There are six birds and three clocks, and I am using one of the birds today. The stamp is also part of the Bird Trio, available for $8.  You can get Sin City stamps unmounted, cling mounted or wood mounted.  The beauty of unmounted stamps is you can get more stamps for your money and store them in a smaller space.  Then you just keep an assortment of acrylic blocks for stamping.  It helps to stamp on a piece of foam when you use this method.  I use a sheet of thin craft foam.

Here is my Steampunk Hummingbird stamp, temporarily mounted with double sided tape on an acrylic block:

I thought it would look great with metallic embossing powder, and I wanted to create a scene in which the hummingbird is visiting a flower.  But what kind of flower does a Steampunk bird like? A Steampunk flower, of course.  So I made my flowers from metal gears and foil!

Steampunk envisions the future from the perspective of the past.  Usually, the point of view is that
of the Victorians, who lived through the Age of Steam.  So there are lots of gears involved!  There are folks who have restrictive ideas about what should be called Steampunk, so if you feel uncomfortable about it, you can call this Industrial Hummingbird or Clockwork Hummingbird.

Here’s how I made the card. 

First, I folded a sheet of 8 ½ x 11” natural cardstock in half to make my card.  Then I cut a sheet of black cardstock into two  8” x 5” pieces.  I wanted a black background because I thought it would contrast well with the metallic embossing powder.  But the black was too stark for me, so I
sprayed it with Perfect Pearls Mist in Heirloom Gold.  This softened the look, but made the paper
curl and wrinkle:

Here is a tip: I iron my paper when it curls like that.  I set the iron on low, put something on the
ironing board to protect my ironing board cover, lay down the paper blank side up, put something on top to protect the iron and the paper from each other, and then iron it lightly.  Then I hold it
flat until it cools.  It may still curl, but now it will curl in the same direction and you will be able to glue it flat.  If you have time, you can let the paper sit between two heavy books for a while instead.  But I find the ironing gets wrinkles out better.  Don’t iron your heat embossed pieces, though.

Once the black paper was dry and fairly flat, I saved one piece for my background, stamped my hummingbird on the other with embossing ink (I used the VersaMark Watermark Stamp Pad) and heat embossed with Recollections Copper embossing powder.  When the image had cooled, I cut it out.  You could stamp right onto the background, too, but I was afraid of not getting the
hummingbird in the position I wanted it, so I prepared the image separately.  Tip: Use scissors with a fine tip and move the paper, not the scissors.

I inked the outer edges of the background piece and the outer edges of the card with ColorBox Pigment Ink in Copper, and adhered the black background to the front of the card:

I made the flower stems and leaves with aluminum foil tape.  It’s not duct tape, but it is made for repairing HVAC ducts.  It’s really just a roll of metal foil with adhesive, and it’s great for lots of projects.  I have bought it in the hardware section of WalMart and from Amazon.com.  Here is what it looks like:

I adhered a strip of the foil to a piece of black cardstock:

I gave the foil a little texture with a tool designed for working with metal foil:

If you don’t have these tools, you can use a stylus, the end of a bone folder, the tip or end of a knitting needle, a fork from your kitchen, or basically anything else.  You can put the foil/cardstock stack on a texture plate and rub over it or run it through your diecut machine with an embossing folder. 

Then I dripped on a few drops of Adirondack Alcohol Ink (rust).  Since I was creating metal flowers for my mechanical hummingbird, I only wanted to use metallic colors, but you could
choose any colors you like.

You want to apply the alcohol ink in drops, and then daub it with felt.  If you try to spread it
around by wiping it over the surface, you end up with very little ink on your project.  If you sort of pounce your felt up and down, you get better coverage.  I make a little dauber from a square of felt, held together with a rubber band:

The ink dries right away.  I cut 1/8” strips of the foil/cardstock using my rotary paper trimmer.  The lengths are approximately 3”, 2 ¾” and 2 ½”.  Then I diecut three hearts out of the foil/cardstock
using the Sizzlits hearts die.  I cut one of the largest heart and two of the medium heart:

Then I made leaves for my flower stems by cutting each heart in half.  Here are my stems and  leaves, ready to be attached to my background:

You can also draw leaves and cut them out or cut leaves with another die.  If you don’t have aluminum foil tape, you can use another craft foil or cardstock.  Or you can draw the stems and leaves with metallic ink.

I made the flowers with gears by Bead Landing; I got them at Michaels.  They are made for crafting,
and are thinner and lighter than real gears.  You could use gears from the hardware store or diecut gears.  I chose three small and three large gears to make three flowers:

Then I prepared the stems, leaves and gears with adhesive:

This would be a good place for Miracle Tape, but I had Glue Lines by Glue Dots, so that’s what I used.  I cut the little rectangles into pieces small enough that they would not be visible behind my pieces, then did a mockup of my layout, leaving the protective layer of plastic in place on my adhesive:

Then I removed the protective layer of plastic from my adhesive.  I put the leaves down first,
then the stems, and finally the flowers.  I put some Glue Lines on my hummingbird and attached it to my card (You can see that I started out with a gold hummingbird in my mockup, but I switched it for the copper one).

If you don’t have the gears, you can make the flowers lots of other ways.  You can draw or paint them, stamp them, or diecut them.  You can use buttons, real or diecut.  Here is a sample of some alternate flowers you could use.  The watch faces and clockworks are real, but you could stamp them or use diecuts.  The gears were cut from metallic paper using the Spellbinders Sprightly Sprockets die set:

And you can use a different kind of metal – soda cans!  You rinse the empty cans out and cut them
apart with metal shears.  Then you can put them through your diecut machine and color them with alcohol inks.  This flower was made with the Tim Holtz Tattered Florals die:

The Clocks & Birds plate also includes a Steampunk bird at rest and a Steampunk bird in flight, as well as a similar trio with a floral/butterfly pattern.  And I haven’t even gotten to the three clocks yet!  So there is no end to the projects you can make with this set!

SUPPLIES for the Sin City Scraps Steampunk Hummingbird Card:

Sin City Scraps Hummingbird stamp from Clocks & Birds plate

Cardstock – two 8 ½ x 11” sheets (one black, one natural)

Perfect Pearls Mist in Heirloom Gold

Aluminum foil tape

Alcohol ink (I used Adirondack rust)

Copper ink pad or marker (I used ColorBox pigment copper)

Embossing ink pad (I used Versamark Watermark Stamp Pad)

Embossing powder (I used Recollections Copper)

Gears

Adhesive

 

Please let me know if you have any questions about this project!

Starshine Wishes,

Karen

The Steampunk Aesthetic: In Defense of Nonworking Gears in Art

I usually use my blog to show my latest work or my latest finds, but today I’d like to depart from the norm and share some views.

I’ve seen many critical comments about the use of nonworking gears and clock mechanisms in art.  I haven’t used these items in my own art yet, but I plan to, and I feel the need to defend artists who use these items decoratively. 

I’ve recently become interested in Steampunk art.  Like most people, I bring my own unique perspective to the movement.  As a medievalist, I’ve always avoided the Victorian period, as it seemed much too modern for my interests.  Then several things happened that changed my mind.  I started learning about traditional handcrafts (like spinning, weaving, lacemaking, leatherworking, metalsmithing) and started researching their histories.  My husband and I bought a house built in 1790 and I started learning more about the history of our country.  My mother got me started on a Victorian murder mystery series.  The books were well-written and well-researched, and focused quite a bit on the status of women and the poor, and that struck a nerve for me.  Then the current corset craze led me to research the history of women’s clothing, and I found picture after beautiful picture of women in Steampunk mode. 

Steampunk envisions the future from the viewpoint of the past, hovering around the Victorian era but venturing into the periods before and after.  I find the whole concept fascinating.  I’ve spent a lot of time studying “what was” (in literature and history) and “what is” (languages) but Steampunk is all about “what could have been.”

Most of the negative comments refer to people who use nonworking gears and clock mechanisms in work they label “Steampunk.”  The critics think that the gears, even if they don’t work, should at least represent something that pretends to work.  So maybe this is just a debate between representational and abstract artists. 

Here is something you all know: art is subjective.  On the other hand, classification of art into genres could be more objective, but really, it comes down to individuals.  So, maybe this is a debate between purists and those who like to step outside restrictive bounds.

To me, Steampunk is all about possibilities (what could have been or what could be) and human ingenuity (what we have made, what we make, and what we could have made).  Gears are perfect symbols for possibility and human ingenuity.  A shiny, new, symmetrical gear represents potential and human invention.  An old, tarnished, damaged gear can represent realized potential, spent energy, or human accomplishment. Clock mechanisms are similar.  They are amazing, tiny creations of incredible exactitude, displaying the very best in human workmanship.  And they are beautiful!  That’s not even mentioning the concept of time and how people react to it.  A clock means many things, including the passing of time, the human construction of time, the life cycle, and nostalgia for past times.

The “nonworking” aspect of the criticism is interesting.  Recently I’ve seen pictures of necklaces with vintage thimbles as charms and bracelets made from old tape measures.  Nobody has criticized their creators for using nonworking parts!  Rather, they have been praised for recycling unused pieces.  Steampunk artists who make ray guns don’t make real ray guns.  They make something that suggests a ray gun, the way that someone else’s nonworking gears suggest associations with invention, mechanization, creation of wealth, realized or unrealized potential.

Maybe the answer is for people using nonworking gears to avoid the use of the term “Steampunk.”  But it’s really just a label adopted for the purpose of getting people who might be interested to look at one’s work.  Any time you label your work, you take the chance that someone else will disagree with your choice. 

When I complete my pieces featuring gears and watch mechanisms, I may call them “Steampunk” or I may avoid the controversy and call them “Industrial.”  I’d just as soon not label them, but if you don’t, no search engine will ever bring anyone to your work.  But I will not hesitate to use those parts, even if they serve no practical purpose, because I believe they are beautiful and I know they are meaningful and culturally significant.  My art is my expression, and my attempt to reach others, whether or not my work fits neatly into someone else’s category.

As always, I send you Starshine Wishes,

Karen