A Box for City & Guilds - Another Finish!

Now the City & Guilds is really finished, it is high time to put up a post on the fifth item that I made as part of the course. Why did I wait so long? Well, let's just say I lost interest at some point and it took forever to pick it up and finish the last few stitches...

One of the five "Items" for the City and Guilds Certificate needs to be a three-dimensional item, and I had decided to make a box. This box is intended to be used for appliqué and patchwork blocks; to store them together, and/or to take them with me, together with fabrics and hand sewing materials, so I can work on them in classes or anywhere else, really. In short, a work box.

The inspiration was taken from images of Tulips (I had to get some Dutch influence in there somewhere, I suppose). I have always liked botanical drawings, so I started out with a few of those and drew and re-drew tulips until I had an image I was pleased with. The idea was to applique the tulip flower and some leaves.

Then I found some lovely silks, heavily discounted (fortunately), but not quite the right colour (unfortunately?). The heavier dupion silk is a green-grey curtain material with a slight slubby effect, and quite firm. Ideal for the box. The drapier satin silk I found in the wedding section, but of course it was white. This then made me take out my silk paints, and have some fun! It was good I did not have an unlimited supply of silk to play with or else I would still be having silk painting fun - and no stitching would have been done on the box at all!

After a lot of samples:

Trying out sea salt effects on silk paint - sample

Mixing and blending to get the right colour for the leaf and stem - samples

Then the "real" work started, a bit scary, because by that time I was down to just enough fabric to make my piece...

Painting the piece of silk to use for the tulip flower

Fortunately, it all worked out just fine! So, then the sewing started:

The leaf/stem shape, and the flower shape were transferred to the dupion silk, and reverse (hand) appliquéd into place. This actually went very fast!

Then the piece was quilted, and stretched over the grey board panel with some extra padding. As you can see in the picture above, I also (foundation/paper) pieced side panels for the box - and left the paper in for stability.

The box panels were slip stitched together, then I added extra stitching to the top edge:

Tabs for the handles were added during construction as well, and the handles themselves were cut to size from a kindly donated lecturer's stick...

So there you have it:

Another job done...

Sandra