I've been on a bit of a frugality trip when it comes to the craft cave. In part that was due to lockdown - my favourite yarn and fabric shops were closed to "in person" shopping and I find buying online a bit of a lottery unless I know the exact thing I want. I've also been concerned about the amount of waste crafting can create. Not every pattern tessellates (fits together without gaps) and particularly when dressmaking there are lots of "scraps."
I've been thinking of ways to work with those small irregular pieces so that every scrap gets used and the thing that seemed perfect for the zeitgeist was to turn them into fabric cards and postcards.
Just because you can't go on holiday doesn't mean you can't send a post card. While we were all physically distancing (I prefer that term to socially distancing) I thought it would be nice to add personal touches when communicating the old fashioned way - with paper and ink. So instead of sending commerical cards I've made my own. Some I've sandwiched into card frames, others I've turned into post cards by sewing them onto a card backing.
I started playing around with abstract designs - getting a feel for the process. Next I made a few picture cards in my favoured palette of blues and greens, but then I decided I wanted to go bold and a bag of cotton oddments provided the perfect inspiration - rainbows.
Rainbows were everywhere in 2020. They were adopted as a symbol of support for the NHS and its workers. Before that the rainbow flag was adopted as a symbol of the LGBT community and before that a symbol of peace and hope and before that... You get the idea. For all those reasons a rainbow of colours felt like an image people might like to receive.
I cut strips from the offcuts of quilting cotton and sewed them onto scraps of interfacing (or stabiliser as it is also known). While the finished design doesn't have that familiar rainbow arc I think the pattern definitely says rainbow and hopefully brings a smile to the faces of those who receive the cards.
The science bit
It occurred to me that while I knew the basic idea of how a rainbow is formed - the colours which make up white light are scattered (spread out) as they pass through water droplets - I'd never really thought about why a rainbow is circular (though only part of the circle is seen from the Earth's surface).
My first draft of this post got quite technical but I've pared it back to hopefully something a little less like a physics lecture.
When white light (like daylight) passes through raindrops it changes speed. It slows down when it enters the raindrop and speeds up again when it goes back into air. That change in speed makes the light ray bend, a phenomenon known as refraction. It's like when you go from moving in air to moving in water. Water resists your movement more than air so you go slower.
The image with the triangle represents what happens when white light is shone at a glass prism (a bar of glass shaped like a Toblerone (TM).
Light rays are refracted as they enter the glass prism but different colours of light slow down by different amounts. Blue light in glass slows down (refracts more) more than red light, so blue light refracts/bends more. Because the different colours bend by different amounts they become spread out into a rainbow. This is called dispersion. The same thing happens when light hits a rain drop, but some of the light also reflects off the back of the raindrop.
It is the reflections which produces the familiar shape of the rainbow. The light reflects most strongly, so appears brighter, when the sun's rays hit the raindrop at around 42 degrees. When you have lots of raindrops reflecting light at around 42 degrees that light forms a cone as seen from your eye and it is that cone which gives the rainbow its shape.
More information on rainbow formation can be found here and there are lots of physics sites which explain more about reflection and refraction.
I hope you liked the cards even if you didn't read "the science bit." Why not post a comment or drop me an email (the address is on the website) and let me know what you make with your fabric scraps, or what picture you'd like to see if a card were to drop onto your mat.
For next Monday's post I'm already feeling inspired by some close up pictures of moss I found. Where will that inspiration lead? Come back next week and find out.
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