Many of these Top Tips are in response to questions I receive in either my in-person or online classes. Today’s Tip is no exception and will cover two instances of the whys and hows of “keeping your foundation taut” while prepping and working on your fabric collage.
Take my word for it, the pins and tape I recommend to hold your foundation fabric taut are much easier to deal with than any helper cats you may have—such as my Djinni, above. Plus, cats can be unreliable and hard to work around, once you have them in place. 😉
A fabric for a foundation is typically an inexpensive muslin to be used as a base to assemble and glue your collage pieces onto. The foundation fabric will become a permanent part of the layers of a fabric collage. To transfer a drawn and enlarged design, the fabric is placed on top of the paper enlargement of the line drawing and traced from there.
#1.) The first instance of “keeping your foundation taut,” is based a student having trouble transferring the enlarged line drawing for her collage subject onto her foundation fabric.
Upon further inquiry, she was having trouble with the foundation “bunching up” as she used her Sharpie marker to trace the image to the base fabric, and the design was getting distorted.
The solution is to make sure that both the paper enlargement and foundation fabric are securely attached to the drawing surface so that both “sheets” remain stable as you make the tracing. How you secure the paper and fabric depend of the tracing surface—a table, cutting board, floor, or your future pinning board.
Using tape or pins, first smooth out the paper and attach it to your surface, then place the fabric and smooth out from the center in all directions, taping or pinning it as you go, so that it remains stable to the paper underneath. Then trace away!
More info on foundation fabric can be found in this Top Tip—What Lies Beneath.
Top Tip:
Keep your foundation fabric taut to your drawing or collage surface.
#2.) The second instance of “keeping your foundation taut” is for the collage process itself. Sometimes as I’m circulating from one student to another in a class (both in-person and online), I notice that their foundation fabric is looking a bit “droopy” as it shows from behind the in-progress collage. And sometimes, the student may also be a bit despondent with their progress.
While this isn’t do-or-die issue, I believe that keeping the foundation taut influences the perception of how the collage is progressing. A drooping base can make the project appear more “messy scary” than it really is—and pretty much every collage is going to go through the messy-scary stage anyway, so best to prepare.
For myself, I find that when the foundation fabric is nice and flat, ready to work on, the bits of fabric I’m pinning in place for the collage are going to lay flatter, and I have a better feel about how the collage is looking and progressing.
So, give your project and yourself the best start possible with an extra minute or so of preparation at the very beginning—repeating much of the same steps as above—making sure the foundation fabric is securely attached to your working surface before beginning to place fabrics onto the foundation’s drawing.
The steps are: onto your pinning board, smooth out your foundation fabric (after the design has been transferred onto it) from the center out, in all directions. Pin around the edges of the fabric, so that the foundation remains flat and stable.
For a pinning board, a one or two inch thick styrofoam insulation board from a home-improvement store, works quite well, and can be (relatively easily) cut down to your desired size. More info on pinning boards can be found in this post—Work On It: Pinning Boards for Fabric Collage.
Top Tip:
Keep your foundation fabric taut to your drawing or collage surface.
Keep Cool and Keep Collaging 🙂