velvet folds

I'm trying techniques for the fabric manipulation part of assignment 3 and came across this note called gorgeous fabric manipulation (velvet) so I tried it. I only used very small fabric samples to make initial tests, and I should have used a heavier weight fusing/interfacing as the velvet is heavier fabric than the light fusing I tried. apparently this works well for silk too

Use a cooling rack that has both horizontal and vertical grids. place velvet upside down and with a pencil push little bunches of fabric through. Take a fusible interfacing and then place on top of tufted velvet (wrong side) and iron. The grid should have little feet on sides so that the velvet is not crushed.

at first I couldn't understand what she meant by using the pencil — I thought she meant to put holes in the velvet, so I only tried this on a very small piece, in case it didn't work out. which it didn't. but I did like the grid indentations in the velvet, so the experiment wasn't all lost. I was going to try a metal collander also but the holes were too small for the velvet — perhaps silk would be better for this as it's lighter fabric, though it would also be a hard surface to iron.

I didn't have a metal rack with squares/vertical and horizontal grids, only horizontal rows, so I had to hold two racks together to form the squares. next time I might try buy another rack. or use small pegs/bulldog clips to hold the velvet through the holes, as it was hard to get it to stay in them. I had to iron it first to try hold the velvet into shape, and then iron the fusing over it to seal / hold it permanently.

I also tried a small metal egg cup, though it was harder to iron due to the irregular (non-flat) shape