Let's Talk "Touchie - Feelie" ...

...in other words - let's talk about texture! 


Texture is everything. It's what makes a hand-made item scream out to someone "Touch me!" When someone has the desire to touch your work, you're half-way home. If they have a pleasant experience when they do touch the item, it's sold.


I enjoy creating designs that force me to think about what kind of "experience" the piece can offer. Sure, sometimes it's just visual. But when you can get the visual down, and then be able to add dimension, softness, or stimulation of other senses such as touch, you've truly created an interesting piece indeed.

The piece I've used to illustrate some interesting "texture" is a throw pillow that will soon be offered on my Etsy site Poladora when the shop opens. It will be part of a series called "dark chocolate Mocha Meringue". It was born out of a beautiful fabric of large flowers of gray and brown on a deep chocolate background. (I have some very beautiful coordinates for Mocha Meringue that will also appear in the shop.)


The main body and back of the pillow is hand crocheted in a bulky weight chenille chocolate brown that is very soft to the touch. I used this to balance out the "stiffness" of the method I used to create a three-dimensional look on the side banner of fabric that is applied to the left hand one-third of the front of the pillow.

The effect seen was achieved by hand quilting the entire flower (including every petal, leaf, and stem), to Warm and Natural cotton batting. (I machine quilted the stripes - I was tired!)

I further enhanced the three-dimensional look of the flowers by hand stitching some additional "shading" underneath some of the petals.

I used a new product on the back of the fabric to create the "pucker" that allows the flowers to "jump off" of the pillow.

And, of course, it would not be my work if I did not try to further embellish the pillow in some way - thus, the beading! The beads are hand applied and are precision-made and galvanized with an infusion of real gold.


A bit much, you say? Then you don't know me very well yet.


Until next time...