Happy New Year to you all, hope you had a good holiday season.
I'm starting the year with the January challenge for the Postcard Fabric Art group I belong to where this year's theme is historical centuries.
The first is Ancient Egypt and I have decided to make fashion my focus for the year.
I started by searching out my photos and souvenirs from our visit to Egypt 12 years ago, along with some useful magazines I kept with pictures from the tombs.
I chose this image of a goddess painted in the tomb of Tutankhamon as her dress looked very interesting, close fitting with what looks like a pleated sash.
I decided to make an inscription in hieroglyphics and copied some of the above symbols to hand stitch onto my piece of fine organza.
I used this transparent fabric so that I could mount it on top of the sheet of papyrus I planned for the background.
I found another tomb painting and using my lightbox I traced some of the outlines onto the papyrus, which wasn't easy because of the ridges in the texture of the grasses used to make this ancient type of paper.
Next I traced the goddess onto a piece of felt that I layered with some red organza to make that reddish skin tone. I used bondaweb to adhere some fine white linen for her dress and head band, then started to embroider the details.
Her wig is a piece of black felt stuck on and the sash is a length of red ribbon embroidered to depict the pleats. Next I bondawebbed her to the organza background ready for the assembly later.
I was lucky enough to find a piece of Egyptian themed fabric in my stash so I interfaced it for stiffness and made it into a double sided frame to support the layers of my design. Onto the back I hand stitched the caption on organdie then attached it inside the edges.
Finally I inserted the papyrus and then the organza with the goddess into the frame and stitched the edge to hold them all together. I really like how the papyrus drawing shows through the organza and I wonder if you can work out what the hieroglyphs say?
