Mixed Media Assemblage - Season 1

Before beginning an assemblage piece it is important to bring all of the elements you hope to use together and play with their arrangement for a while. In this segment, Heather will show you how to lay out your base fabric and play with the arrangement of your selected items. Using the elements and principles of design, she will help you build a composition that is pleasing to the eye and tells a coherent story.

Once you have a good idea of what items you are going to include and where they are likely to be placed, you're ready to put together a quilted base to hold all the bits of your story. Here, Heather will show you what and how to layer and quilt to build a quilted base that is strong enough to hold all of the items you plan to use but also easy enough to stitch through. Heather will help you with stitching choices, thread colors and types and what products work best for this technique and why.

Here is where the real fun begins! In this segment Heather will show you lots of different ways to attach your relics and found objects to the surface of your quilt so that they are both attractive and stable. With each new addition, she'll help you understand how, when and where to add visual interest and when to leave things as simple as possible. To add extras visual interest, she'll use some bits and pieces of specialty fabrics, trims, ribbons and other embellishments. These items will be added to augment the relic pieces and make them more cohesive.

In this final segment Heather will go over various ways of finishing the edge of your quilt and discuss the possibility of finishing the surface of the quilt with a clear coat finish. Then she'll offer up a few different ideas and ways of hanging your finished work. Whether it's done with coiled wire or a model airplane propeller, she'll help you discover a hanging apparatus to bring a perfect finish to your quilted assemblage.