Dissolvable fabric.

From looking into free emebroidery and feather textures i've started to explore different materials such as bin liners, fabric and now aqua film which dissolves in water once you have sewn the design onto it; leaving you with just the threads. I looked into an artists called Amanda McCavour who uses this aqua fabric and i love her designs! I got into contact with her, and she replied which i was thrilled about, she seems really friendly.
This is what it said:

Hi jessica!
Thank you so much for your email all the way from england. Its exciting that you are studying art and that you are experimenting with water soluable fabric.

I've been working with it for a bit now and I still think its magical. There are so many possibilities. I'm sure you will make something great.

I draw and take photos before starting to sew most of my pieces. In the past my inspiration has come from the places I have moved from so part of my prep work was looking for those images and objects through old photographs or through finding the objects again, and then drawing renderings of those objects onto fabric.

Right now I think my work has two veins. One is referencing dioramas though documenting ephemral spaces with thread and the other is referencing the accumulative presence of thread though installations based on scribbles or spirographs.

I am doing a residency in quebec city right now where I am making a fictional thread garden. For this project I started with my dream of having an amazing garden. From there I looked at botanical drawings and embroideries of flowers found in the home. I hope to make hundreds of flowers and suspend them from the ceiling so they look like a field of flowers.

I hope your experiments go well! Let me know if you have any more questions.

All my best,
Amanda McCavour

So i got to work straight away using flamingo inspired colours, of

 pretty pinks and oranges!

These are photos with the aqua film still in place, as you can see from the shininess between the threads. It has a weird texture like cling film, slightly thicker and is a little sticky.This is the glue within the fabric that reacts with water to keep the thread intact.

You can see straight through the threads allowing you to overlap and layer it up over something like fabric or a print for example. Layers and overlap are 2 of my words im using to represent my concept due to the idea of birds feathers are overlapped and layered up. I want to create something with layers and using textures and colours from birds as a strong sense of inspiration.

I layered it up over a glued layered sample of white fabric of net and cotton. The two textures work really well together in complimenting one another. The layers are organic horizontally and the threads are organic but are placed in a vertical position in the rule of three to draw your attention across the page.

This technique results ina own made fabric. It's extremely delicate just like a feather!! The sewing pattern came from the idea and textures from a swans skin on its head. So have combined swans and flamingos together!

I liked this technique so much (although time consuming) i decided i would convert this translation of threads into hand embroidery....I used chain stitch as i thought the organic small circles were a clear transcript of one another. It's still a work in progress but i am using the printed fabric i produced of the feathered textured lines and cut holes into them and stitched around them to keep the edges from fraying.

The pink dye is a thermo responsive one so its interactive and the colours are directly taken from a flamingo. Its very much simplified but i quite like the cartoonised effect it has. It has combined several technqiues of layering, transparency, printing,interactive and embroidery!

Jess x

-I enjoy sewing :)