Trash Gothic Arch

This weeks' theme for the Gothic Arches challenge is trash. Not exactly inspiring to me but I did my best!

By chance the latest issue of Cloth, Paper & Scissors magazine had arrived on Saturday with an advert from MistyFuse and this is the technique I used to make the background. I keep all my thread cut-offs and bits of left over fabric in a large pot. I never use them but they look lovely in this pot. Now finally I had a purpose for them. I put a large sheet of baking parchment on my ironing surface, followed by a piece of MistyFuse. I layered threads and fabrics on top and followed this with another layer of MistyFuse and then baking parchment. Then I ironed the whole lot. The MistyFuse layers make it all stick together and you can then iron the resulting "fabric" onto a piece of watercolour paper which I had pre-cut to the size of one of the new Gothic Arches shapes (template on the website).

To this I added images (girl, soap, heart) from a paper bag which you get when you buy something from one of the shops (Fireside) in our village. I have to admit here that I went and bought something there this morning just to get the paper bag!! You can iron this onto the background (don't forget the baking parchment!!) and I also added a stitched line, just to re-unite all the disparate images. I sewed on a transparent net with sparkles (gift from Tristan so definitely no trash, but I did not buy it myself!) From yesterday's newspaper (so today's trash!) I cut out the words Mother's Day, which it was here in the U.K. and added this to the arch. I smuggled in a red dot (Paperchase) and the plastic ribbon (a gift).

The arch was finished with red zigzag stitches around the edges.