Mixed Media Project: Printed Linen & Hand Embroidery

For the longest time (since my ear­ly years in col­lege), I’ve been itch­ing to do a mixed media project of my moth­er & grand­moth­er. Final­ly a week before this past mother’s day, I decid­ed to tack­le this project for my mom!

Late­ly, I’ve been sewing a lot of flower girl dress­es and projects for oth­ers, so I was excit­ed to set aside every­thing for this per­son­al project! I knew I want­ed to print an old pho­to of my babcha on linen and hand embroi­der details of a Ukrain­ian shirt, but oth­er than that I didn’t have much of a plan, and decid­ed to wing it as I went along.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, my print­er would not take my linen, (I freaked a lit­tle because I was afraid I broke the print­er). As an alter­na­tive, I print­ed on muslin and a water-sol­u­ble inter­fac­ing. I chose to work with the inter­fac­ing because the inter­faced muslin print was a bit blurry.

I bast­ed the inter­fac­ing to the linen. And since I opt­ed for the inter­fac­ing, I had to stitch all the details (not just the shirt). I first machine-stitched the facial and shirt details using my domes­tic sewing machines. I did this by dis­en­gag­ing the feed dog and man­u­al­ly guid­ed my mate­r­i­al through the machine.

I wasn’t entire­ly sat­is­fied. But since it took quite a bit of time and patience to stitch the pho­to­graph, I decid­ed to con­tin­ue on with what I had.

Next, I hand-embroi­dered the details of the Ukrain­ian shirt with col­or­ful floss. It was very dif­fi­cult to push the hand nee­dle through the inter­faced linen and water-sol­u­ble inter­fac­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly this took much more time than I had anticipated.

 

But once the hand-embroi­dery was fin­ished, I was sat­is­fied and hap­py with it.

The last and final step should’ve been dis­solv­ing the inter­fac­ing and fram­ing the piece. But when I tried to dis­solve the inter­fac­ing, it did not dissolve!

I tried every­thing to dis­solve the paper from the stitch­es-chem­i­cals, a cou­ple of laun­dry wash­es, and pret­ty much every­thing except Dra­no. But unfor­tu­nate­ly,  noth­ing worked!

I wasn’t will­ing to quit this project after spend­ing so much time on it, so I decid­ed to use my fab­ric dyes to dye the cloth and inter­fac­ing. The dye looked fine, but when I start­ed to set the dye with the iron, the dye bled. Need­less to say I was not very happy.

I had 24 hrs to fin­ish the project. I could either start over, or buy fab­ric paint to paint over the skin where the dye bled. I decid­ed to spoil the sur­prise and leave the deci­sion up to my mom, who advised me to paint.

By the time I fin­ished cut­ting out the piece and paint­ing the skin, the piece no longer resem­bled my babcha.

Because of this, I final­ly decid­ed to pitch the mixed media piece! 

I might try this again when I have free time! Hope­ful­ly the sec­ond attempt is a success!