A Journey into 3D Fiber Art Vessels

1. Introduction and Welcome!: There is something magical about creating a three D art vessel. Unlike two dimensional textiles, a three D vessel has depth, volume, and texture, making it a unique and engaging art form. It serves both as a functional object and an expressive piece of art. Hi, everyone. I'm Rita Ln, and I'd like to welcome you to the journey of how to create a three D fabric art vessel. But first, a little something about me. I have been teaching in the fabric art industry for over, I think, ten to 15 years, quite some time. And also, I have been working with manufacturers in the fiber industry. To people like Fairfield, fabrics, shedding fabrics, Kernicthreads, and many more. In addition to that, I have been the author of a book on fabric I'm sorry, fabric manipulation. It's a tough one. It's called Texture Magic. In addition to that, I have authored two books that are part of a master's degree program. One of them is called Financial Freedom for women, and the other one is called the Hidden side of the soul. So basically, I have been designing, teaching, and manufacturing for well over 20 years. But in addition to that, I have been a. I have produced an award winning documentary on Alzheimer's disease for public television. And in addition to that, my past 20 years, I have been owning and operating an non medical in home care agency in the state of Colorado. And guess what? Now, I am teaching my class three D fabric art vessels on Skillshare. 2. Class Project: In this class, you're going to be pushing up against the boundaries of traditional fiber art, venturing out into three dimensionality, where we have learned so much about learning and creating art on a two dimensioned flat surface. You are now going to be taking all of that talent and adding to it the techniques and all the other things that you need in order to create not only something that is now on a physical surface, but it offers volume besides texture and interest. You're going to be learning things like techniques that are used to create this vessel. I'll be also showing you how you can create other vessels, not only this shape, but this is a wonderful one to begin with. Then in addition, you'll be learning how to use my techniques, my fabric ideas that are especially important if you are, for example, wanting to have flowers that I quilt that never will. These products are extremely unique. I've been doing this for many years. You can put it pretty much anywhere, and you'll start to think that way on purses, something that you put in your hair, great dimension to put on anything that you're going to be framing or even on your quilts. I want you to be able to finish this class, knowing that not only have you expanded into three dimensional art, but you've learned how to take a very simple pattern and create a stunning three dimensional vessel along with learning how to use my technique to create dimensional flowers. This is just the beginning. Let's get started. 3. Gather Materials to Begin: Everyone. Now we're in the studio. This is where we'll spend probably most of our time as we're working on the art vessels. Here is the one that we're going to be working on today. I'm going to talk first of all about some of the supplies that I think are really important for you to have. Number one is choosing your fabric. As you can see, I chose a very solid color. I wanted more accent to be on the flowers. Here on this particular vessel, I even used felt as the backing. No problem with that. You can take anything and turn it into something like this as a vessel. But I prefer that it be a cotton fabric, something that is flexible. It can have a print on it like this one has little dogs on it. I would say stay away from anything that is a stripe or a checker because those are very hard to match up and I will have a hard time trying to figure out what you're trying to say with that. A couple of things that I think are important for you to have are when it comes to picking out a stabilizer, that is the thing that keeps the firmness of the vessel. I have listed two, one you can get on my website, and the other one is one that you can purchase at pretty much any hobby or quilt show or quilt store or any place where they sell fabrics. Listen to this. Okay. Can you hear that? That's me scratching against the hesive that is bonded on both the front and the back side of this stabilizer. This is called a double fused stabilizer. It has a stabilizer on both the front and the back. It is flexible, but it is what we consider firm, not solid. There are some solid ones out there that are used for purses. That's fine. It will not work with this. Follow the directions on what I recommend for that. This is another product that I recommend and I don't have a substitute for it because this works great. This is called heat and Bond Ultra hold. Again, you can buy it pretty much anywhere. Some place like Walmart, Joanne's, hobby lobby, any of the big box stores like this and even in your local stores, and of course, you can always look online. You don't need anything more than half a yard, but I think most of these packages come in about a yard. Along with that, if you can, I would suggest that you buy one of these mini irons. I think they call them a mini craft iron, if I'm not mistaken. These are great to have, when we get into the situation where I want you to have the vessel fabric to fold over over the stabilizer. It's really much more convenient to have something that has a small fat face surface like this one does. You can use your big iron if you want to or the minion irons that are about this big. You just want to be careful that you don't burn your fingers. Then lastly, get a teflon pressing sheet like this one. Again, you can buy pretty much anywhere including online, craft stores, things like that. Or you can use parchment paper that you can buy at Dollar Store, the grocery store, very inexpensive. Those are the ones that I really feel are important not to try to substitute with anything else, but you can always reach me by e mail, and I'll be glad to help you out. Let's get going. Hey, I have a bonus for you. Besides having the videos, you have a download PDF file that shows every step that we're going to be taking in order to make this vessel. Go ahead and download that along with the supply list and with the patterns, and then I'll meet you over at the work table. Okay. Okay, I'm going to show you now how we're going to cut out all the panels for the vessel. This is the pattern that you download and you'll have one over here for just using for the vessel. Then you have one that has this dotted line, and that's to show you that when we do the front fabric, we want a half of an inch margin all the way around and I'll show you why. I took all of those. I cut one out and this became my pattern. And then I took the pattern over to the stabilizer. I traced it and I cut out four pieces of the stabilizer. Then my next move is I go to the fabric that I'm using for the front fabric, not the inside, but the outside fabric. As you can see, I started to outline. What I've done is I made up for my own sake because I can forget this. I put a half inch and a half inch on both sides of the pattern, and then I took a pen and you can take whatever you want. And then I just started to make lines that were approximately one half of an inch. The reason I want that half inch is because this is my cutting line now for the fabric that I'm going to use on the outside of the vessel. This way, I have enough so that I can fold it over and it'll make it for a nice soft edge on the outside of the vessel. I'm going to do four of those and With what we need in order to have the front fabric adhere to the stabilizer, we're going to be using the fusible web that I talked about, and I want to just take a minute to talk about it in case you're not familiar with it. This is what fusible web looks like. It's a web of an adhesive or a glue. And when you put it down on a fabric, and another fabric on top of it or a teflon sheet or parchment paper on top of it and press it. It melts the glue right onto the fabric. Why do you want that? Well, two things. It's a good stabilizer for your fabric. Second of all, it makes it very convenient to know that you're going to have two pieces of fabric or fabric and a stabilizer stick together, which is what the goal is. But I also wanted to show you, there's all different kinds of fusibles. See this one, this is almost weightless. It's almost like touching nothing. Yet it is also a very good fusible. How do you know what to buy when you go to the store? They will sometimes at the store, the helpers will sometimes call these things stabilizers. But you're looking for fusible web. Honestly, I think if you've got a nice light rather than a heavy, this is light. This one's light, this is the one I sell on my website, but you can buy it anywhere. They're all very good. What you want to do is make sure that you get the right fusible web. And sometimes it has a wrapping on top of it so that it's protective. But you'll be really good. If you have any questions, you can always e mail me. So I want to show you what we're going to do. Here's the fabric that I have chosen for my vessel. This is the outside and this is the inside. Now, it's got a little bit of give to it. So I I want to put some fusible web on here just to demonstrate so you can see what we're going to do. I know you can't really see this, but this is the backside of the fabric. This is the fusible web. I'm going to put this on top of it so that it doesn't stick to my iron. I have my iron set on cotton. Wait me try it up. I'm going to set my iron on cotton. Then what I'm going to do is put heat on this. Probably I don't know, five, six, 7 seconds, something like that. And the heat will begin to melt and adhere to the back of the fabric, which is what I wanted to do. Let's see what we got. When I peel this away, nope, it's still not hot enough. It's starting to get there. So I'm going to do it again. I didn't have my iron heated up, guys, and I didn't want to take too much time of your time in order to do that. But you always want it on a dry cotton setting. You always want to have either a teflon sheet like this. Parchment paper will work fine too. Otherwise, you're going to have a mess to try to get this off the plate of your iron. Okay. Now this has adhered beautifully. Down here at the bottom are some of the excess pieces that I don't need. I don't know, even again, if you can see this because it's white on white, but there's a line right here. There's a line right here. This is shiny, this is dull. That tells me that this side is ready to go with fusible web. I don't know if you can see it or not, but anyway, you'll see how we're going to work with that. This is what you want to do is get the fusible web on the wrong side of the fabric that you're going to use as your outside fabric. And then we'll go on to the next step. 4. Fold over Fabric: I have taken the stabilizer and I have taken the front fabric, and I have pressed them together. I put it down on either a te telon sheet or parchment paper so that the glue would not stick to anything else face down, cotton, setting, dry, just enough to tack this down. Now I'm ready to start folding over the edges. If you'll notice, I did cut where the curves are where there would be some tension so that these will fold over really nicely. I started one here so that you can see this This side has been folded over, and this side is almost folded over, and I use a small iron for this. For me, it works so much better if we do. Now, so that I don't keep pressing over here to where the glue is. If you want to take a piece of parchment paper, tiny little piece and just cover it right where you're going to be ironing, that'll work just fine. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do now the top. You can see that when I fold this over, I'm going to have extra fabric on the ends. I'll show you how I take care of that. So my iron is hot and it's on cotton. I love this little iron. It really gives you so much more control when you've got tiny little pieces or areas like this which are extremely important and yet you don't want to have a mess of glue all over the place. I have this on high, I think it is, which is probably like cotton. Everything is sticking except for the edges and I'll show you what I'm going to do with that in a minute. Then I'm going to go to the bottom here and I'm going to roll it over. And then I'm going to cut those tips off. Now, if this is a fairly heavy fabric that I have here. It's not a regular cotton. But as you can see, it's really grabbing onto the fusible that is on the stabilizer just really well. I'm going to put this aside for right now, and I'm going to fix the areas where I don't have them marked down. If you want to use your regular big iron again, line this up with a piece of parchment paper. Okay. And as you roll this over the stabilizer, you can but this piece of parchment paper right there, and it'll protect your iron from getting into the glue. Then you can just pull this across. You can pull this off when you're done. S. I'm going to continue folding this over. Okay. Coming up here now, fold that over, trying to stay tight right to the edge right there. Fold this one over. Cutting these corners and getting the tension out of the corner really helps to maintain this nice curve of your vessel. Now, as you can see, and I left this so that I can deal with some of the errors that may come up. I intentionally left this really short up here. As you can see, there's just hardly any way that's going to fold over. So you get creative and you say, I think at the end when I get here, I'll roll over as much as I can. But maybe what I'll do is on the top, put some nice cording, which I've done to save my self from a lot of mistakes that I've made. But I wanted you to see you can always find a way to correct anything that seems to be a mistake when really it can turn out to be a really good design element. I'm going to fold this one over again. I love this iron. I can't say that enough. It is just so easy to manipulate When you've got these little corners and you know you've got to have some heat on it. But how are you going to do that and not get glue all over the face plate of your good iron. As you can see, I'm not staying on this too awful long, don't need to. It's a good hot iron. Get that out of there. Then again, if I wanted to, I can just put this right over it, this piece of parchment paper to help secure it down to the stabilizer. I think I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to finish with these other two. Then in the meantime, what I want you to do is I want to I'll move these aside and I'll show you how to do the base. You cut out the base of probably file folder and then cut it out of the stabilizer. It should match what is happening here. Now, there will be some changes here as you start to manipulate your vessel a little bit, but we won't worry about that because it'll fit. It may not look like it does. Cut it out. Okay. Get two pieces of fabric that are the same size and put one on one side and one on the other and use your cotton setting and put this together so that now you've got your base ready to go. Okay? So I'll finish this up and now then we'll go on to the next step. Okay. 5. Inside Fabric Fused To Vessel: My pattern. Again, I'm not using this side because I already did that for the fabric that I'm using on the outside. And what I did is I cut it out. So that's exactly the shape that I need to go on the inside. And what I'll be doing is lining this up using my dry cotton, iron and pressing this down. Then I can trim off anything that may be an excess on the side. For example, if this was a little bit over the edge, you can just trim that down because the next thing we're going to do is be putting the vessel together. But I also wanted to tell you how I put the fusible on. Now, in the directions, it says to use a fusible. This is a good product, it's called Misty fuse. You can buy these online, Amazon, craft stores, Walmart, wherever you want. You can also buy it on my website. What it is, it's a fusible web. Now I'm going to put a piece of blue material down here so you can actually see what this looks like. See how it's so light weight. It's just a light weight web of glue of adhesive. And when you take a piece of this and you have your fabric that doesn't have it on it, and you put the two together, you heat set this by using again, a dry cotton iron and you get a product if you can see this, can you see that little bit of shine? This is fabric that now has fusible on the back on one side of it, in this case. In this case, it's on the wrong side of the fabric. It's ready now for me to place it wherever I want. In this case, I'm going to put it on the inside of this vessel. When I reheat this, when I put a dry cotton iron to this and press it, it's going to all stick together. That's what this fusible web is and how you use it. I highly recommend that you either use parchment paper or a tehlon sheet when you lay that down. What I usually do is have my fabric wrong side up, put the fusible on it and put another piece of tehlon or parchment paper on top of that and give it a nice press for five, 6 seconds. Then you're ready to go. All right. Now let's move forward and get these cut out and get them ready to be ironed, pressed down to the vessel. Okay. I've got all of the vessel panels ready to go. I have stabilized, I have put fusible on the back of the inside fabric. We have taken the front fabric and fused it to the stabilizer and folded the edges over. Now I'm lining this up. I have my dry iron on cotton and I try to match it as much as I can because I know I can trim off wherever there might be an edge right here, I think it's going to go over. I'll just trim that off. But right now with my iron on cotton dry I'm going to give it probably about 5 seconds, five to eight. Same thing on the front, just to kind of smooth it out. Let's go to the next one. Again, I can see this is going to need to be trimmed and that's just fine. Big thing is anywhere 5-8 seconds. You know, everybody's iron is a little bit different. You'll know. The idea is that the heat is melting the glue that is on the back side of this fabric and on the stabilizer, giving it that extra strength to make sure that everything stays fused together. Let's move this a bit this way. Okay. I'll finish this up with all four. I'll trim the sides. I'll trim that off right there. If there's a little trim right there that needs to be done. Let's see, what have we got here. Nothing needs to be trimmed on that one. Right here, I can tell I need to trim that. I'm going to finish that all up. This will be the last one that I do. I'll trim this up. I'll press it and then I'll trim it up and then we're going to be ready to start putting the panels together to get the three dimensional vessel. 6. Stitching Vessel Together: We're ready to put two panels together. But I'm going to use these panels as a demonstration because if I tried to use the thread that I use on these, the thread color complements the color of the fabric, and it would be pretty hard for you to see how the stitching is going. I'm going to demonstrate it using this one and using black thread. Okay. Now, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you've got both bottoms even and that they're side by side. Then what you're going to do, I use these little clips to clip this together, we're going to start down here at the bottom and on the inside. I'm going to start here and pull the needle through so I can bury the n. Put the two together. From this end, I'm going to come through both of them. Now, here's what's called a whip stitch. I think, anyway, the stitch I use underneath the needle and over the two panels and pull it all the way through. You don't have to do it tight, but you want to keep the two panels firm. Starting again, on this side, under the needle and over the two panels. Now what I want to do is make sure that I'm doing even stitches. I'm going to make sure that I keep an equal distance between each of these stitches as I continue to stitch all the way up this panel. Again, coming through needle thread goes under the needle and over the two panels. As you can see, I can move this up and I'm creating a nice, even stitch. I'm going to put this aside, and we're going to start with the regular panel that we have. Let me see if I've got a not in this or not. I do it down here. Here's our two panels. Insides together, line up the two at the bottom, clip here. I'm going to clip here, but I want to show you something. See this right here where it looks on even. That'll be stitched in and you won't even see that. One of the things that's so nice about the way that we do this stitching is that's very forgiving. Remember, these panels are flexible. They're not firm, but they're flexible and they get stronger as you put all four together. Ready? This is even. I'm going to bury the knot by opening it up and just bringing this all the way through. Then I'm going to hold these two together. Start here and go all the way through, and then I'm going to take my thread and go under the needle and over the two panels and draw my thread through. Again, start on this side, bring the needle through both panels, thread goes under the needle and over the two panels. The biggest thing you want to remember is to keep your stitches even as you go all the way up, you can stitch it down firm, but you don't have to press it hard. You don't want to leave an indentation. You don't need that. You just need it to be pretty and to be even. Can you see that? I'm going to continue all the way up this panel, all the way to the very end. Now, I'll come back after I have two panels sewing together so I can show you how to put four panels together. I wanted to show you that I have taken two panels and I stitch them together, and these two and stitch them together. Then I took this set and this set and stitched them together right here. Using the same whip stitch for all of this. Now, I'm ready to do the last one and we'll have our vessel completed. Again, I want to remind you whenever you're going to put two panels together, you always want to make sure that these two bottoms are straight. I'm going to put a little clip there. Then once I get to stitching to right about here, I can let go of that because I know we have a real nice, real firm stitch going on there. Now I want to show you here. Let's imagine that I have this stitched all the way to here. Now I can see I got a little bit of a challenge here. I want to show you how easy this is to work with. This is all flexible and as you stitch, it will work out just fine. You won't have any gaps. I would get another clip and clip it right here to hold that firm, and then continue stitching and you can see that it's just going to fit in there perfect. And then we'll have a perfect seam with a perfect tip coming together. So I'm going to go ahead and stitch this together, and then the next one thing we're going to do is stitch the bottom on and then we'll be pretty much ready to go on to the next step with the vessel. Okay. Everything sewing together, worked out well. All the tips came together. Looks good. Now let's look at the bottom. Here's the one we cut out for the bottom. I told you before, depending on how you tighten these base parts when you start sewing, you'll have to do a little manipulating, but this is going to fit real smooth in here. What I do now is I just turn it until I find which seems to be the best layout. And I think, let me see here. I think I like this one. This is hitting the edges. This will manipulate for me just fine. What I'm going to do first is I'm going to do the whip stitch starting here and go to here. That's easy for me to do. Now, the last three, that is your option. For me, I hot glue these guys. Because after a while, it just gets bulky to keep trying to have one hand inside, one hand outside, putting it all together. If you can do it, that'll look so nice, if not, always start with at least one side being stitched with your whip stitch and then decide if you want to use the hot glue gun for these final three or if you want to stitch all the way around. I'm going to go ahead and finish the bottom and then we'll come back and see what we do next. 7. Bond Fabric for Petals and Leaves: I want to show you how I use the heat and bond to create the stiff fabric that we need in order to create these three dimensional flowers. This is the product that I use. I would not live without it. It is such a key part of making these beautiful flowers. So what I do is I have a piece of fabric that is the right side and the wrong side. The bright side is the right side. I'm going to put it face down with the wrong side up. I have cut a piece of the heat and bond. This is the shiny side. It is temporarily is temporarily glue, you might say adhered to this piece of paper. What I'm going to do is take it with the glue side and put it face down on the fabric. I'm going to take my iron, which is set on cotton dry. I'm not going to move it back and forth. I'm just going to press it so that the goal here is that the glue will adhere to the fabric so that I can get it ready to put the next piece on. This is a little bit on the warm side. I'm going to wait until that cools a little bit. Then I'm going to take this piece of fabric, peel this off, put this down, and then we'll have it ready so that we can start to create those petals that we want. I've removed the backing and this is pretty shy. I think you can see it shine. Shiny side up, fabric, wrong side, right side, wrong side goes down, lays on top of the fabric with the glue, all I do is press I don't iron back and forth. Again, the heat is allowing the adhesive to bond now the two pieces of fabric together. Which they are. Now, I always do that on either a piece of parchment paper or on a teflon sheet like this because you don't want to get the glue that's coming off of here on anything where you can't get it off. That's the nice thing about these pieces of teflon or the parchment paper. Excuse me, is that the glue will not stick to it, it can just peel it right off. From there, we are now ready with the fabric to take our pattern, follow the directions that you have. Trace out as many petals as you need, cut them out. Then in the next video, you'll see how I form these so that we can end up with this. That's going to be the beginning of your mean of your flower. You do the very same technique to the leaves. Two pieces of fabric that have been bonded together with the heat and bond ultra. Take your pattern, trace out your pattern, cut your patterns out so that you have five leaves, and then you take a lighter of any kind of green fabric like anything that's a lighter green, and you just cut out a tiny little curve, I can find it. Here we go. This is going to be an accent on one side or the other. That lets you know that's where the light is hitting on the leaf and then a tiny little strip is put down the middle as a vein, you can see that adds to the dimensions of each of the leaves. You don't need to have any of the heat and bond on these two pieces. You can just flat glue those down. Once you've got that all done, then we're going to start putting all these units together so we can put them onto your vessel. I've cut out the patterns for the petals. I've traced the petals onto the fabric, which is now fabric on both sides and it's the heat and bond that has fused these two together and it is the heat and bond that will determine what shape I can make these into. I have them all here. What I'm going to do is demonstrate for you how I heat these so that you never have any wilted flowers. Move this aside. I'll bring my ironing pad in I have my cotton. I have my iron set on cotton, dry. And I'm going to use the back of a pencil this part. And what I'm going to be doing is A little press on this, put it in the palm of my hand, and then a gentle little pressure so that I can create a shape. I'm going to count to, I don't know. Maybe 3 seconds at the most when it's on cotton and dry. It's warm, and I'm going to put a a cup shape with the palm of my hand. This is it's not hot, it's not uncomfortable, anything like that, but once I pressed this, this is the shape that this little petal is going to continue to have. If I wanted to change it, all I'd have to do is just heat it and it will reshape. I'm going to do this to six petals and show you how I put six petals together to create one flower. Now I have six little petals. Now I want to do one more thing before I create a flower with this. On the tip of each of these, I'm just going to touch the tip and curl it over my finger. This way, I've created a really nice dimensional little petal. Again, the choice is yours, you don't have to do this, but it makes it much more interesting and makes it more real. The wonderful thing about this heat and bond between two pieces of fabric, heat and bond ultra, it's called. Oh, my gosh, I couldn't live without this when it comes to creating some interesting designs with my three D flowers. Now that I've got all of these shaped the way I want them to be, I'm going to heat up my glue gun and I'm going to glue three of these together like a triangle like this. And I'm going to glue another three together at the tips, where the leaves touch where the edges touch just like this. Then what I'm going to do is put one on top of the other. Now I have created my flower or as you can see here. Here's the flowers that we are creating. Next thing we'll do is we'll use the stamens and we'll actually hot glue those and the beads onto the flowers, and then we can move on to the leaves. We're going to talk about let's do the leaves. You can use your regular iron or you can use this little iron, whichever works for you. What you're going to do is you're going to get this thing warm. You can manipulate it, pick it up and then just put it right over your finger like this. And see how it formed. That's going to look pretty good. We'll do it again here. This is a pretty hot iron even though it's a tiny little guy. I make sure that it's got enough heat on it so that I can manipulate it. Keep it there until it cools. It's not hot, it's warm, but it isn't hot. I'll do all five of them this way. Do this guy. See if this is a little different since this is a little smaller leaf. See how easy that is. What a difference it can make. It just adds much more interest. I'm not pressing hard. I'm just trying to set a shape that I think is going to be more interesting than just having them flat on the outside of the vessel. Here we go, another one like this. Now, if this isn't enough for you, although you don't want to be too dramatic with them, you could curl the tips up if you want. But I'm going to wait and see how I like that because I'm not sure we really need that, but for now this works really well. 8. Creating Flowers: Petals. We're going to put them together so that we can create the first flower. Got my glue gun ready to go, hot or or warm, doesn't matter. I'm just going to touch a little bit on the tip. Be all I want is just enough so that I can get this to kind attach this way. And want attach over on this way. Now, if you notice, I'm using my tepon sheet so that I don't get glue all over the place, and if some glue does spill over from where I have glued it, it just rubs right off of here. This is either that or a piece of parchment paper is going to work really well for you. Those are my first three. I think I might tighten this one a little bit more. Put a little dab of glue there. I like using glue rather than stitching it, but that's just my preference. If you want to hand stitch these, all you want to do is have just enough so that they're secure on the sides so that they're still mobile. You can move them around. Let's see. Let's go with this one. Put a little dab here and a little dab here. Okay. Create an imaginary triangle with these. Move this around. Put one more dab right here where these two come together. V. Now I have got six petals and I'm going to put one on top of the other so that I can create the flower. Play with it till you see if you've got it the way that you want it. Then go ahead and put a pretty good dab of glue right here. Okay. And you can move this around until you've got it where you want it and then just gently press it and it won't take long for this to dry. Now I've done this to two others. We've got all three of our flowers ready to go. I have my glue gun ready to go so that I can use hot glue and glue the stamens down into the center of the flower. The stamens come pretty long like this. This is in fact the entire package that I got. I think it was at one of the craft stores, and it's called flow I put this where you can see it. Flower stainens This one was on clearance for less than three bucks. They come along like this and I cut them down. I'm going to start with a pretty good blob in the center of this. Let it set up for a second and start to put one by one, the little stamens in there. Now I'm going to take just one little section over here on the side a little bit at a time and put a couple more in one and two, right there, and start to build on the outside. Doesn't matter if you get too much glue because since it's clear, it isn't going to show. It's going to be covered with beads once we get to the part where we're adding the beads. But I'm using these little tiny stamens to just fill in the center. One decided he didn't want to do that. I'm going to put it right there. Well, I don't have glue there. That's why that doesn't work. We're going to put another little d of glue right there. Give it a second to set up and then just gently put this in the glue. And manipulate them until it dries, standing up as best you can. It's coming along really nicely. I think I'll add a little more right there. Stand these guys up a little better. There. You can clean off all these little spider webs of glue after you're all done working with the glue. All right. I think that's going to be okay. Maybe I'll add, what do you think? Probably a couple right there. Oh, I have two left, so let's do it. Put that one there. And that one right there. Now, I'm going to put this down, put my glue gun away to the side. Let this cool off, and then the next thing I'm going to do is put the beads on. If this is dry, which I think it is, let's go ahead and start to do this. I've got a half a circle there. Create a little funnel at the top of this and just let the beads pour. There's going to be more beads on here than I need, but this is the easiest way to just get a nice circle of beads around the stamen. Do the same thing over here. Give it a good bunch of glue, create the little funnel again and just drop the beads in there. See how easy that is. I'm not really pressing very hard on these. I'm just going to form it a little bit so that it does end up as a circle. But I'm going to let it dry. One more good dose of glue right here. Use that funnel again and drop these in there. That should be more than enough. Don't worry, you'll clean up all these little guys that hang on and don't belong in the circle. You'll get those out of there after everything sets. I'm not going to play with this any more than what I have. I'm just going to let this rest. Then I'll come back in after it's dried and clean it up so that it looks more like a circle like this. 9. Putting It All Together2: On your if I kept mine in front of me here. Yeah, here it is. You know how I've talked throughout these lessons about the face plate and how it can get sticky, especially if you get a little bit of fusible glue or the glue that's on the stabilizer on there. Here's a trick to getting it clean. Get yourself some of these dryer sheets. Like this and rub it while your iron is hot. Make sure you've got it probably the top lan sheet would be good. But go ahead and rub it and it will clean this guy off as clean as clean could be. This is the greatest tip ever. Keep one handy. Keep it in a block bag. Anytime you get goop on your iron, this is awesome. Let's get going and put these pretty flowers on the vessel. It is now time for us to put it all together. We have our vessel ready to go. Pull out your flowers, your five petals, and a strip of a cording. This is a dark green cording that I have here. You can get this pretty much any place where they sell trim, fabric, hobby stores, again, quilt stores. So you have no problem finding that. This is the one that is done. You can see this before I glue these down, I always make sure that I'm happy with where I've got everything situated. You don't want to put things way down here unless they're big, this is a big enough object where it could go here. I normally say we use the odd numbers to really make an interesting design. If you put four things or an even number, I just I don't know how to explain it, but things don't move. It just is there. This also will help the eye to just keep coming around and around and staying within this environment as you put this together. The first thing I do and put that aside for right now is and you can see this on the directions if you downloaded the directions. I show you a picture where I put three s and this little is really where the chords going to go. Let's imagine that this is my design play area. What I'm going to do is start laying these three out because these are the dominant players and trying to decide where do I want them. Again, I don't want to get too far down here because the way that this is shaped, you're not going to necessarily see that. You don't want them to all be equal apart because again, that's not a very interesting design. But if we had two that were close together and one that was a little further apart, you can see how you can keep this triangle will keep you going and you can move this around, let's say if we went this way. If I put two together to close and this one is lop sided. I want you to play with this and not equal spaces apart. If I had two down here and one up there, it would be top heavy. But if I have two up here and one over here, I really like that layout. If I play with this and bring this in, this is going to be not that sharp a curve but something like this. Then I start to lay these down. It'll all start to come together. I'm encouraging you to start to play and see how you want it to be laid out. You've got a good picture of it that you can take it just like it is with the design. Once you have decided where you want everything to be, put it on there and see if you're really happy with that. I'm going to be really happy with this layout. I think I'm going to bring that up there, this one up here, and then we'll see where the S goes. We'll figure that out too. Once you think you know where you have these things, make a tiny dot where each of these flowers are supposed to be and then glue those down. Once you've got those glued down, then we're going to take the cord and you can either hand stitch this like a couching looping thread or glue. Again, I just glue it. Then the last thing we'll do is we'll put the leaves on. I'm going to play with this and then I'll come back and when I come back, I will have these guys where I want them and then we'll work together on gluing that down and then going to the step with the veins. I've been playing around with this. The only thing that I have glued down is, of course, the three flowers, and then the vein. This is going to be cut off eventually. If you see over here, I did allow for some stems to come out and that's what I think I'm going to do here. There'll be a stem there and a stem there and I'm debating what to do with this one right here. But I wanted you to see how we're putting this together. I'm really happy with the way. I mean, see how you can just change it and put it anyway you want. So I'm going to move this guy out of the way, and I'm going to play with this some more and then I'll come back once I've got it all down. Well, there we have it. It is done. I'm very happy with it. Both of them. I'm very happy with both of them. I just want you to know that you can put this together anyway you want. Play with it. You may even want to make different sized leaves, or you can even make different sized flowers. Use the same pattern, only make it smaller. You can add variety that way. You could have two of these and a couple of three smaller ones, even a but if you chose. Think it through, play with it. Don't think you've got to be perfect or that it has to be exactly so. Mother Nature is so forgiving. She just she makes flowers so beautiful anyway you do it, have fun and I'm proud of you. I'm proud that you were able to do this. 10. Review & Surprise Inspiration : I am so proud of you for taking this class, and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed sharing it with you. Let's go over just the review of what you are able to accomplish in this class. First of all, you learned how to trace and cut out a pattern so that you could begin your first three dimensional vessel. You learned the importance of having exactly the kind of stabilizer that you need in order to have the flexibility but yet the firmness to create the panels that are the beginning of creating the vessel. You also learned to choose whatever fabric you wanted as long as it was one that didn't have stripes or it wasn't a very busy fabric, something that would compliment what you're trying to do with your design work. Once you had that all together, you learned how to take each of the panels and stitch them with the whip stitch. By doing so, you put this together. Then you moved on to learning how to create these fabulous three dimensional flowers by using a very special technique. The great thing as I always like to say is these little petals will never wild. You learned how to take not only these, but then you learned how to do the same thing with the leaves, and then you are able to create your own design. You can you could leave it there, but I'd like to leave you with some thoughts. This is a four paneled vessel. It's beautiful. This is my mockup that I used when I was designing this particular vessel shape. If I were to add one more panel, this is what you would get. See how you can change the shape by adding just one more panel. It gives you more body to be able to work with to add more designs. Then not only that, what if I added one more panel and took it from this to this, to this. Now, we've really got ourselves a lot of body to do some design work with. If you think about it, you could even open these up and bring these panels down. You might even want to bring each corner down and you could do some design work on that. My point being, this is just the beginning. If you guys are excited about this, you don't have to go any further. Just play with what you have, and you see that you could take it from really one that's absolutely beautiful as four panels. To a completely different design that has five panels. Then finally, one that has six panels. I probably wouldn't do any more than six because then you start to get something that looks like it's crunched down. But play, I'd love to see everything you do in the project gallery, if you have any questions at any time, always I'm here for you. I'll be glad to answer any of your questions. Remember, there is never a dumb or stupid question. That helps me know how I can get better at explaining things for you. Enjoy and I hope I see you at my next class.