Applique Compositions: Stage 2

My applique dreams are proceeding apace, though with a few delays as I await the acquisition of the last few tools and materials to start experimenting.

While I’ve been waiting, I’ve started to plan some tentative applique ideas in Photoshop- basically finding pictures that I think would work well and converting those into traceable (and cuttable) shapes.

So the idea I originally had about 2 years ago, which I have still yet to try, is to project these images onto a cutting board. Then, piece by piece, cutting out each shape using different colored (and patterned) fabric.

Then, once all the pieces have been cut, I will again use the projector as a guide to assemble the full picture together again on a larger piece of fabric, keeping them in place using a special temporary adhesive before permanently sewing them to the backdrop.

The whole idea is not all that new- people have been doing applique forever and developing a lot of these techniques, and the applique scene on Instagram is off the chain.

I’ve never seen anyone else using a projector in this way, though I’m sure there must be people out there doing it.

I just got my projector in the mail the other day- a nice small portable one that only set me back about $100 on Amazon. Now I just need to make some sort of mount for it to hang from the ceiling and I will be off to the races.

One cool thing about prepping all these images is that I can quickly use a lot of these graphics files to create screen prints as well. So some of them may end up as prints if not applique compositions. Some, maybe both.

I plan to shoot a lot of hyper-lapse videos of the process on my phone, so watch for that! Need to figure out how to post those on WordPress, but they will definitely be on our Instagram sooner or later.

So stay tuned for part 3! This is a work in progress.