As I begin to play around more and more with fabric in my art and crafts, I’m trying to incorporate other types of art and techniques that I love…like Altered Art. This fabric collage, Rose Gardens, was great fun for me. It’s a little bit primitive and rustic, and a little bit shabby chic, and still with that altered art flair. This piece is about 4″ x 5″ in size. I’m using this as entry into the Three Muses Old Fashioned Challenge.

I actually started this with a muslin bag that I grungy’d up with my special grungy sauce mix. I just love the look of grungy muslin, what can I say? So that is what you see on the outer edges of this piece; it serves as the background for the whole collage.

Next I took a plain piece of muslin and did an image transfer onto it using a gel medium. I used a vintage photo of a woman (I’ve named her “Rose”) picking roses outside her window. At first I was irritated that my black and white image came out looking pink in the transfer image, but hey, what’s a gal to do? I just decided to go with it. After that dried I distressed the edges of the muslin, then sewed that onto the grungy muslin bag using black thread. I just like the way the black thread contrasts with the muslin.

Then it was time to embellish, so I took some decorative ivory-colored trim and used that to frame my transfer image. Then I cut off all the edges of the muslin bag–because it wasn’t really a bag anymore once I sewed the image onto it. And the nice part is that the extra layer of fabric from the back of the bag makes the whole collage a bit more firm, which I like. I frayed the edges of the remaining part of the grungy muslin bag. Then I tied 3 paper roses together with a black ribbon and sewed them to the bottom right corner of the collage.

At some point I may use this small fabric collage as part of another bigger project. But I am  happy with it as it is for now. And one fun thing for me on this…there is a flaw in the image transfer, to the right of Rose’s dress, near the bottom. It’s a little white spot that didn’t quite transfer from the photo. But to me, it looks like a little fairy…and I love that!