Found Object Stamping

I made these yesterday for a series that I am working on for the past month. I am using leftover dyed muslin, Lumiere paints, and found objects. You will need to wait and see what I do with it. I am having a challenge though over at the Quilting Arts forum during the months of Jan/Feb creating these fun sheets of fabric. Get the chance to win one of three goodie bags.

Here is the link:

http://quiltingarts.com/forums/p/2736/15038.aspx#15038

It is free to become a member.

Melly Testa's cool Vid and new class

Melly Testa and joggles.com have partnered up for a class. Take a look. joggles. com is one of my favorite places for textiles.

Soy Wax Eye Candy

This one is one of my absolute faves. It looks scrumptious on both sides. I cannot have asked for it it turn out any better if I planned it that way.

This one not very successful - one of very few (above).

I absolutely love this one (both sides).

Loved this one - one of my faves (above)

This one did not turn out as well as I would have liked (above).

One of my favorites (above)!

This one is not as faint in color in real life.

These wonderful pieces of fabric are from Melly Testa's workshop soy wax batik at Art Unraveled in Phoenix, AZ. I just got home a few days ago. I had to come home to iron them to heat set the Lumiere paint, scrub the paint off where the wax was, and wash the wax off the fabric. These are the results. I am very happy with my results. There were only a couple that did not turn out well. You can click on the picts to get a larger view of the pict. You may not be able to see the metallics in the pict but they look FAB! in real life.

Melly's sox wax technique is also in her rather new book, Inspired to Quilt: Experiments in Art Quilt Imagery by Melanie Testa

http://www.amazon.com/Inspired-Quilt-Creative-Experiments-Imagery/dp/1596680962/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1250456278&sr=8-1

If you ever get a chance to take a class with Melly, grab it. I had the most fun in her class. I am rather picky when it comes to taking workshops. I had a lot of fun.

See a child's creativity come to life!

Click on this link and see this website:

http://www.art2believe.com/

I know the people who run this site and they are doing a very fun thing for kids. Way cool that they take kids' art and turn it into something that they can keep for a very long time or give to a loved one.

When I made felt monsters out of my kids' drawings, they loved it. I can imagine how kids would feel if they got their artwork turned into dolls or pillows. Food for thought ...or turned into pieces of art.

Thought I would share.

Postcard Challenge

I am doing a postcard challenge for the Quilting Arts website forum members. It is free to join the community. Here is the link to join and to play. It is under announcements.
http://www.quiltingarts.com/

Theme is the word that best describes you.

Just starting to work with fabric?

If you are just getting started with fabric, you will need a few basics. You will need a very large self healing mat. I got most of my stuff from Joann's with my coupon or when it was on sale. Might as well save yourself some money. Make sure you store your mat flat. You need to store your mat flat on the carpet or against something relatively flat if you are storing it vertically. I stored mine against the wall and a long shelf for awhile. Now it is always just lying flat on the carpet - I use it so much. You will also need a rotary blade. I use a 45 mm one from Fiskars. The one with the straight blade will work fine. You should change it once it starts to pull or you don't get an easy cut. Be very careful with this!You also need a long metal ruler and/or Quilter's rule. Since some fabric sheets are longer, it is easier to cut them with a Quilter's rule. I don't use the measurements on it as much as the fact as it is longer and I can get a longer cut with it.

Don't bother buying a smaller self healing mat if you plan on making any kind of art quilt in the future. You will want the longer, wider mat so you can cut fabric on it. It is worth the money now to get the larger mat. The one I use all the time is Olfa 24x18 mat. You may wonder how to get straight cuts of fabric. I get relatively straight squares all the time. I make sure that the fold on my fabric is to my left when I cut. When I cut, I always make sure that either my bottom or top is straight. I then cut my right end straight. That way, I have my right side and either my bottom or top straight. I cut what size I want. Remember to always measure twice and cut once. I always lean over and put more pressure on the rotary cutter so I don't have to go over it again to get a cleaner cut. When I line it up again to get my height or width cut, depending on how I cut it first. I line it up again with the bottom or top straight, cut a bit off the right to get it straight and then cut my pieces. It saves me a lot of time and aggravation. I know there must be a fabric grain this and that kinda thing but I don't pay attention to it. I am sure the quilting gods will strike me down one of these days, but I am not really good at following all the rules when it comes to my art'ng. Don't tell my 6th graders that!

One other thing, make sure you line up the top and bottom or your Quilter's rule or ruler with your lines on the mat really well. If you think it looks off, then it probably is. Remember to measure twice and cut once. If you don't put good pressure on your ruler, then you will probably move it while cutting and it will be off on your fabric. You can probably repair it on the mat. If not, just save the scrap for another project. Don't toss out the fabric! It can be used for something else. If it pisses you off, then just send it to me! I will put it to good use.

Hope it helps you out. I hope you have as much fun playing with fabric as I do.

Skinny Book Page

Just catching up. I finished up this month on this swap in the MM art friends Yahoo group swap. This was my contribution. Mine was a fabric page.

Kandi Corp Wax Art

This is a piece of silkscreened fabric that I absolutely love. I mounted it to a hard board using that thermobond stuff and an iron. I used Kandi wax with fine tip to write the words and to etch in the black veins or whatever you call it onto the barren trees. Looks cool, doesn't it? The tip gave me a lot of control. You can click on the pict to make it larger.

This is a great piece of silk that I used my felting machine on. I felted it together before sewing the heart on it. The heart had some silkscreened patterns on it. I added on quite a bit of wax to the patterns. I bet you can't tell what is fabric paint and what is wax. I was very happy with the results. I also took the fine tip and dotted the silk areas with red. I followed the stitches where I stitched along the silk to keep it together. The wax works with fabric in ways that I had never thought of before. It really does work well with my silkscreening.

Yes, another example of silkscreened fabric. It was just one color. I took the Kandi fine tip and did all this. Look at all the designs and different colors. I basically doodled. I love how the white came out. The black looks great, too. If you know me, I am not a fan of pink. The pink worked well here as well. It provided a great contrast to my flower pattern. It is a great way to spice up my art quilts. Will need to keep that in mind for the future.

These are two little wood embellishments that they use for scrapbooking. They are thin wood flowers and swirlies. They are also good to use as stencils. The wax works really well on wood. Use the fine tip here instead of the spade. Add a dab of glue on the back and you have a great embellishment. It did not take me long to do this at all. It was lot of fun. This is also something that I think that tweeny girls would love to do. My 6 yro was begging me to do. I let her do one with my supervision. She did a great job on hers. When she did hers. I had a heat sheet underneath so she did not have to worry about getting wax anywhere. It also made for easy clean-up on my part. I cleaned the tip for her.

This was a piece of wood that was left-over from another project that was not used yet. It was partially painted with that Tim Holtz crackle paint. You can tell by the small crackles. I know that sometimes wax does not hold well to acrylic paint. I figured I would try it anyway since there was bare wood for it to hold onto in spots. I used the fine tip again. I used some brass stencils so I would not melt anything. I just put the fine tip into the wax cube and then into the stencils. Instead of drawing, I just kinda dabbed it into the stencil. I made sure I got the entire stencil covered as best I could. Little of bit of it bled, but it came out pretty well f0r the most part. Don't you think? I just wrote Kandi Corp Hot Wax free-hand. I love the little ant. I have an affinity for lizards. Like I said before, the wax works well on wood.

I had these ATCs left-over from I don't know what. I sanded the arrow off. It was grungeboard. I used the Kandi Corp metal wax on it to see how it looked. It really made it pop. Just wanted to show you that you can really be mixed media!

This last piece, I used the Kandi Corp fine tip on three wooden discs and just doodled on them. I took out my trusty Dremel and drilled holes into them. I had my jewelery stuff still out and made them into a quick necklace. I just used different colored wax with the fine tip and kept dotting the discs. Done.

I was doing some wax art and came up with some fun stuff that I thought that I would share. When I first did this, I used the spade tip. I shared that with a lot of you via the article I did in Embellishments - the email newsletter for Cloth Paper Scissors. Now, I mainly used the writing/calligraphy tip and that gave me a lot of control. I am so groovin' on that right now. The thing is to be patient and to work in small areas. Have a paper towel or small towel available to wipe up the excess wax. Use an old towel that you don't mind using as an art towel or part of one that you can throw away. Keep wiping off the tip so you don't accidentally contaminate the colors on your art piece. Give it an extra wipe if you are going from dark to light colors. If you want to layer on light colored wax on top of dark colored wax, it will not work well because the light colors have a tendency to melt right into the dark colors. Works better the other way around. It might work better if you let the colors cool completely in between layering. I am not that patient. Just experiment.

Here is the link to the Kandi Corp Wax Art. They even have a video for you: http://www.kandicorp.com/HotWaxArt.htm

Comments welcome. Happy New Year!

Mitten pincushions

The mittens are a little bulky so I used my iPhone to take the picts instead of using my scanner. If you click on them to get a larger view, you can see that some of them are handmade pins. Well, actually assembled pins. I tooks some pins with flat heads or pins with some pearl heads and put some beads and sequins on there with some glue. Make sure that the glue you use specifically says that you can use with metal or it will fall apart after awhile. Make sure the glue you use also dries clear.

You might have the problem with how to place the pin so it can dry upside down so the beads stay in place so the beads stay at the head of the pin.

Problem solved. I rolled up a smaller towel and wrapped masking tape around the ends so it would not unroll. I put it on top of a couple of large ziplock bag boxes. You can also use books. There is enough space inbetween to stick the pins upside down on the towel so the pins can dry upside down. That way the beads will stay upside down and near the head of the pin while it dries. The glue might push the bead up a little with the air bubbles. I would give the beads a push down when I was done to make sure they would all dry near the head of the pin instead of closer to the middle of the pin. I let them dry overnight.

The mitten part was pretty easy. I took squares of the screenprinted fabric and put them on some dyed muslin. I took some of that heat sheet/glue stuff to make sure the squares stayed in place so I could zigzap the edges in place. I took a mitten template and cut the shape out. I used fleece for the back. I have a ton of remnant fleece from Joann's. They have a lot of it now since they had the 50% off sale on all their fleece. I did a straight stitch with the mitten inside out. I left the bottom open. I turned it right-side out. I stuffed with fluff. Since this would be a hanging pincushion, I did not bother with rice or beans. I stuffed it enough so that I could sew the bottom with a zigzag a couple of times. I added a small strip of tape measure ribbon at the bottom for hanging. I hand sewed some flower sequins at the bottom of the mitten. At the same time, I put on a few small buttons in the middle of the mitten for contrast.

I found this great place on eBay that sold pins by the gross in great colors. I bought a few boxes so I could create my own pins. You can see the different colors that I got. They are the pins that are on the right mitten along the left edge. Email me if you want to buy or trade for a small quantity of the flower sequins. I have quite a bit of that. Comments welcome.

This is the completed cover for my Treasures book. I was going to do more but decided I liked the backgrounds too much. I kept playing with different colors with the wood flower but could not get it to be just how I wanted it. I finally gave up.

Fabric postcard for a friend

I have not heard from Fast Eyes for awhile. It was very cool to get a postcard from her. I needed to reciprocate. Here is mine. I made mine with a pocket in the middle so I could insert a note to her. You can see the little flap in the top picture.

Treasures Fabric Book

Just some eye candy for all of you. Awhile back, I won a blog contest that Pokey Bolton had on the Quilting Arts blog. She said to let her know if I ever did anything with the screened fabric. Well, I did. I made a treasures fabric book out of it. I took half of the fabric she gave me and made a book out of it. I thought about it for awhile. I was going to make a quilt but I wasn't groovin' on that idea. It started out as a kind of crazy quilt but I went a bit further and made pocket purses out of the quilted material. I still need to paint the wood flower, but it is pretty much done. The pockets are full of little treasures that I really like. The book is so stuffed that it does not sit flat. Unless Pokey takes the treasures out, she will have a little book that stands up on its own! I thought it would be nice to send it to her since she was nice enough to have the blog giveaway. I will hoard the other half for a special project for myself. Not sure what will be yet. I decided to not embellish it very much so you would see the great painted backgrounds from the stencils Pokey used.

Comments welcome.

Making more stencils

I got a burst of energy on Saturday and created some more stencils using the PhotoEZ stuff. It was so easy and fun! I put some paper down on the ping pong table so they could dry. I used my iPhone to take the picts. Some of them are blurry because I was standing on the couch to get a better angle on the picts. Yeah, unsteady hands when toppling off the couch. I drew the little fish skeleton and heads myself. It was quite fun. That was the extend of my art self this weekend. I did make a few art necklaces to be sent out to other people. That only took a little while though. I did sit and see a couple of totally horrible movies. I am still feeling a bit under the weather. The sinuses are still wonky. DH got sick and then my 5yro daughter. So, I got a bit of that with what I already had. Now, about half of kids in class are coughing all over the place. I can't win!