Another Tyvek piece

This month the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge involves the use of the colour purple.  The first thing I attempted went South quite quickly, so I had to find another idea.  Since I may be teaching a Tyvek technique fairly soon, I decided to use Tyvek, to refresh my skills.

First step was to alter the Tyvek with heat, and then paint, both the fabric and altered of altered Tyvek.

Tyvek was a mailing envelope that I cut open and cut off any areas where there was more than one layer.  There was some printing on it but I made that the wrong side without any problems.  People seem pretty well evenly divided about whether to paint first or alter first.  I alter first and do so with an embellishing gun.  This gives me more control, but uses enough heat (350 degrees F) that the job is done in a fair period of time.  A heat gun at either low( 250 degrees) or high  (450 degrees) is either too slow or too fast.  An iron does the job very quickly and is almost impossible to control as you cannot see what is happening under the iron.  It also flattens the "bumps", something I don't want.

The fabric was painted with Parma Purple Seta-Color Fabric paint.  Since I wanted an analogous color scheme I used the purple, plus the same brand of paint in both Fuschia and Cobalt Blue for the Tyvek, all three very watered down so that the paint would flow nicely over the "bumps" of the Tyvek.  As the Tyvek dried, I used a sort of dry brush technique to add Lumiere True Gold.  I had tried a bit of Lumiere Halo Purple and Lumiere Turquoise pearl as well but just around the edge and wasn't happy with either.

As you can see the fabric dried with  both light and dark areas.  When I turned it over it, the colour was much darker but showed a bunch of parallel lines from the Coroplast I used to dry it on.  I sort of liked that and it became the right side.  This gave me an idea of how to quilt the background of the piece, as well.  The True Gold on the Tyvek was too strong for me, and the Halo purple stunning, so this morning, with the piece completely dry, I went over all of the True Gold with the Halo gold.  Much better.

Then to start thinking about beads.  I had several pieces of fused glass, that I had commissioned from a local glass worker, June Derksen.  They had been for another piece that did not work out at all, but the shape and colour worked well for this.  Yes, they are a very deep purple.  

I selected the one on the right for this piece.  By this afternoon, the background had been quilted in parallel lines, and the Tyvek had been shaped and applied to the background.  The fused glass attached to the background, and large selection of other beads assembled for attaching by hand. Guess I better get to work, as I'm supposed to post a picture to the Challenge site by May 31st.