Dina Wakley is one of my favorite people. She's smart, talented, hard working, and funny! Recently, she shared a fun and simple technique on Make It Artsy: hand stitching over stamped images. Watch the video for the how-to:
This is a technique that I love and even showcased in my book, Carve Stamp Play:
This is a fun technique and makes for a great travel project! You probably even own all the supplies you need to get started. I hope you'll give it a try!
Finally, in case you've never heard of Make It Artsy, here's the rundown: It's one of the last crafty TV shows around and you can watch it on PBS, online at makeitartsy.com, or purchase DVDs of each season. We just finished filming our 7th season and we're about to film season #8.
Last month I taught two fabulous art classes at The Ink Pad in NYC. Take a peek at the fun we had:
Every time I teach I'm always reinvigorated and refreshed by other people's talent, creativity, commitment, and excitement. The best part of class -- teaching or taking -- is the people in the room! Thank you so much to everyone who came out to class. I don't think I'll be doing any more in-person teaching for the rest of the year, and this was a great way to go out with a bang! (I do hope to have some new online classes up by the end of the summer!)
As you may recall, I carved a stamp and printed a piece of fabric with that stamp. The fabric had white circles printed on it.
You can't really see the circles with all that busy pattern on top. In my original blog post about the fabric, I wondered what overdying would do to those circles. And so I decided to try it out. This is the back of the fabric:
Ranger Spray Ink (original formula) -- this is not available anymore, but one of my favorite things in the world!
And here's the front of the fabric:
The Marabu spray has mica or some kind of shimmer-y powder in it. That powder ended up sort of masking/obscuring the printing on the fabric:
The Tulip Spray and the DecoArts Paint both look great and the dots do pop!
My personal favorite is the Ranger spray because of its super rich color and almost stark white dots:
I love overdying as an option to transform either a plain piece of hand printed fabric, or even a commercial fabric! I hope you'll see what you have in your stash that can be used to play with overdying!
I'm working on a baby quilt and I wanted to add some big block letters to the back -- you know, go a little bit above and beyond the usual. After thinking about different ways to get the letters on the back, I decided to go with paper piecing. If you've never paper pieced before, here's what you need to know:
It's easy with great results. I think it's very beginner friendly. You just sew right on the line.
But it can be physically demanding -- a constant rotation of sewing machine to cutting table to iron and back to sewing machine. (I threw out my back doing this little dance, btw.)
There are a million free paper piecing tutorials online if you'd like to give it a try. I thought this one was pretty good:
My first experiment with self-drafting paper piecing blocks was this quilt:
Soon after, I took a class in drafting paper pieced improv blocks:
After those experiences and my recent foray into the alphabet blocks, here are two paper piecing hints from me: (1) An "add a quarter" ruler makes paper piecing so quick and easy, (2) Shorten your stitch length to make removing the paper a breeze.
My little text project is still in process, but I thought I'd tell you about the basic process thus far:
I sketched out the basic idea of how I was going to put my blocks together.
Then, since I had several letters (3 "B's") that were the same, I decided to draft my blocks in Illustrator so that I could just print out the templates. (Notice that the template is "backwards" -- this ensures the letter will be facing the correct way when finished.)
Then I began the process of putting each letter together and inserting them into the backing fabric.
I will be sure to share lots more pics when the quilt is done. I made a million mistakes along the way, but I'm enjoying the process thus far!
In case you need some inspiration for the weekend and beyond, for a limited time Nathalie is offering 20% off this year's Creative JumpStart. Just to remind you, Creative JumpStart features 31 mixed media tutorials -- each video is short and to the point (7-10 minutes). The lesson I contributed this year is all about stamping and masking to create this house art:
If you'd like to sign up, I'd appreciate it if you'd use this link as I will receive a percentage of any sales generated by clicking through that link. Thank you!
Please note that some links on this blog contain affiliate links and I receive a small percentage of those sales. Rest assured, I never recommend a product that I don't believe in. :)
