© Kreativ Løve | Creative Lion Fabric is a wonderful way to add colour, texture, and interest to your home and your wardrobe. Textile crafts embrace a wide range of diverse disciplines, from dyeing and decorating to stitching, weaving, and felting, so there are plenty of methods here to inspire you.
There are a number of ways to decorate and manipulate fabric and fibres without using specialist equipment or expensive materials and, once you’ve familiarized yourself with the techniques, there’s plenty of scope to apply your own creativity. Discover how exciting it can be to dunk fabric into a dye bath and see it emerge, transformed into a kaleidoscope of colour. Find out how you can apply fabric paints in a variety of ways to a number of different items, such as a plain cook’s apron or tea towel. A length of fabric can be decorated with eye-catching motifs then, with some simple stitching – no complicated sewing skills are required – made into a shoe bag, cushion cover, or sarong.
Patchwork and appliqué are popular crafts and you need only the most basic sewing skills – and a sewing machine – to make an heirloom bedspread or cosy throw. A dazzling choice of fabrics is available to buy in the shops or online – though if you’re already a seasoned stitcher, you will no doubt have suitable scraps of fabrics lurking in a drawer or work basket, destined to be joined together to make a pretty patchwork. While you have your sewing machine at the ready, try your hand at ribbon weaving, or if you prefer hand-sewing, embellish a plain cardigan with beads.
The pages on wet felting, needle felting, and upholstery provide an introduction to crafts that you might have thought were too complex to attempt, but the illustrated techniques and step-by-step projects demystify the processes involved, allowing you to try out these crafts for yourself.
References: “Craft-techniques & projects”, Dorling Kindersley Limited