Working with Lutradur

Known as Lutradur this product is also sold as Rainbowspun in Australia.  It is a fine fabric, made of spun polyester material.  It is light and wispy and looks a bit like fairy floss being made.  The Lutradur comes in three weights and the light weight comes in many colours and a scrunched up ‘crushed’ finish.    Because it is not woven, it will not fray and you can cut it up and use it in conjunction with pretty much any materials using any techniques.  I love it. 

        

  Here are some of the colours.

At the risk of limiting your imagination, some of the techniques you can use include: 

  

• printing, stamping or painting on the surface;
• hand or machine stitch including machine embroidery;
• run it through your bubble jet printer to apply images;
• use ink or paint washes; appliqué with it;
• distress it with heat;
• use it as a base of needlefelting;
• cut strips and weave into fabric; or
• incorporate strips and snippets into yarns, threads and off cuts and machine stitch into fabulous fabric. 

 Really the sky is the limit.  Anything you can do with a bit of cotton fabric can be done with Lutradur and more.  The advantage is the texture and the light transparency. 

Here are some of the things you can do with it.

Use double sided web to 'glue' light weight fabric to the lutradur and heat to distress.

this is the flip side of the previous piece. I applied the heat to this side

stitch onto the lutradur. It is hard to free motion without a hoop or other stabiliser, so play to get the motion going freely.

Thread will act as a resist when you then heat the lutradur. Imagine the possibility of this!

Here I have ironed metallic foil onto the lutradur.

Ironing Angelina fibre onto the Lutradur adds a really interesting dimension and you don't need doublesided webbing or anything else.

You can print onto the Lutradur in a number of ways. This example has words printed onto TAP and then ironed on the lutradur. Gently heated gives a slight bubbling.

In this case, I painted Vliesofix, ironed the lutradur to the painted surface and then ironed slithers of metallic foil over the top. As the lutradure is semi transparent, you see the colour coming through.

In the next two examples, I printed images onto TAP then ironed the image onto the heavy weight Lutradur.  I then stitched the heavy lutradur to layers of the light weight that were bigger than the original piece.  Heating this then allows the light weight to curl around the heavy which is a bit of a resist.  You can do this a little or a lot.