May 1, 2020

Suitability

Upcycled men’s suits and ties provide suitable fabric for fun collages with a more masculine impression. I use all parts of deconstructed suits and ties including the interfacing, the wrong side of fabric and sometimes even the padding. Two pieces shared here also incorporated my dyed wool and painted wonder under leaves along with vintage and not so vintage buttons.

I make these when I need to take a break from other more serious projects (like mask making right now) and when the large garbage bag of deconstructed wool suits garners my attention because I have tripped over it trying to get to other unusual fabric stashes.

Yoyos are nicely done with no stabilizing of the silk ( I only collect silk ties because of their fluid hand) and the folded hexies harken way back to geometry class.

My general process is to lay out batting, then a piece of Misty Fuse and then start laying out pieces of fabric in a manner that is pleasing to me. I don’t use a backing because I mount these on canvas covered frames. Once in place I press fusing the pieces to the fusible. Even though they overlap it gives enough stability that I randomly stitch vertically and horizontally. Background done so then comes the main feature. For me that is some kind of bouquet often made with the ties—stems, flowers and sometimes leaves although these two pieces both have the painted fusible leaves.