Quilted Postcard Instructions

You can click on any of the picts to get a larger view.

The first thing you want to do is make a quilt sandwich. I am using some screened fabric that I made with my PhotoEZ stencils. I have a layer of fabric, craft weight interfacing, and fabric. I want the interfacing heavy enough so my postcard will not flop over. I always sew a piece larger than the 4x6 postcard size so I can use the extra for something else. It is easier to cut the size I need. In the pict above, you can see me sewing the 3 layers together. I sewed it together vertically up and down with a kind of squiggly line from the middle going out. Straightening and smoothing the sides as I go along. It doesn't have to be perfect. This is what it looks like when I am done sewing. Some people might do their surface design before they do their sewing. Some people will cut the 4x6 shape and sew the 3 layers together but I find that harder to do.

I use a chipboard postcard template to cut the shape that I need. Use a pair of sharp scissors or rotary cutter to cut the postcard shape.

This is what your postcard will look like. Use a tight zigzag stitch to close your edges.

Postcards need to be relatively flat to be sent. Since these are fabric, you will probably need to put first class postage on it anyway. I put a puffy heart on mine because I like puffy heart. It is a "thing" with me. What makes my hearts puffy? I put a piece of felt behind my heart that is slightly smaller than the size of my actual heart and just sew it onto my postcard. It gives it just little puff.

I used some Smooch inks and did some doodling. This is my simple, finished postcard.

So, to recap:

1. Postcards are 4x6"

2. They need to be relatively flat.

3. Quilted postcards are 3 layers: Fabric, interfacing, fabric

You can substitute paper for fabric.

4. Do not attach anything that dangles that will get caught in the postal machines.

5. Don't forget to sign your mailart.

6. Address on the other side and send to someone who will appreciate it.

7. Wait by your mailbox to get a postcard in return.

Have fun!

One last thing, we are sending out postcards to each other in my MM art friends group during the month of August. You need to be part of the group to play: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mmartfriends/

Sneak peak and Tsukineko all purpose inks

I am finishing up a quilt for an article submission, so I can't show you the whole thing. I did take a little pict of it though. I wanted to show you what fun I had playing with the Tsukineko inks and Fantastixs. They are such fun. You can do so much with them. I used them to write and to doodle on my quilt. Once you are done with the Fantastix, you just clean them with a little soap and water. I did a little experimenting and added a bit of Pearl Ex to the ink and it gave it a great shine. I especially liked the black ink. What is nice about these inks is that it does not get hard upon drying. If you heat set it, it will be washable. This quilt will not be washed, it will be one of those art quilts that gets hung up. The borders are really cool. I broke a lot of needles doing it but it was worth it.

The writing and doodling that you see on the blue background are the inks. The painted shapes and doodles within the larger shapes are part of my article. You will have to wait to see how I do that!

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.

Make-It-University Schedule for Quilt Festival

Hi all! The schedule it out!

http://quiltingarts.com/cpsmag/MIU2009.html

If you are anywhere near the Chicagoland area the weekend of April 17th, then you need to be at the Quilt Festival. It is not for Quilters only! It is for Art Quilters and for Mixed Media Artists. Quilting Arts/Cloth Paper Scissors magazine has a big booth area there with an Open Studios area where artists will be doing demos. I will be one of those artists. I will also be doing workshops for them. I will be doing the Puffy hearts on wood (2x) and Bristle ATCs. It is a raffle system. You put your name into a jar. You have to be there at the time of the drawing. You pay a nominal fee, if you are chosen. You can to play for an hour! I have been to a couple of them and they are a lot of fun! Hope to see you there. I will have ATCs there to swap.

Rock On! Challenge

You ever have something speak to you? I always have people ask me things like what is your favorite book or favorite movie or favorite this or favorite that? I really don't have an answer for them because I like so many different things for different reasons. I don't love something more than all the rest. That is not the case with my favorite rock 'n roll song. My absolute favorite song to sing to is "Love Shack" by B52's. I have that on my iPod and on DVD. I crank that song up and belt that song out at the top of my lungs on the way home all the time. I am alone, of course. You don't know how many truck drivers toot at me because I am bopping to the beat. I can imagine what they are thinking! No, I don't enter every single Cloth, Paper, Scissors Challenge, but I had to enter this one. I may or may not get my entry into this one, but this one meant a lot to me. The shack is crooked from the music rockin' it. If you have ever seen the B52's, you know why the shack is such a funky color. They were a funky group. They still crack me up when I see them on a video. You can see them sometimes on the internet. I still laugh at what they have on and at their hair. My kids ask me if I ever had my hair like that (no!). Love Shack is one of my ring tones.

quiltie charms

These are my quiltie charms. I am so loving these. I just wanted to share with you. They came out really well.

December Quiltie Square

This month's color was red. Now that we are done. We are going to take the month of January to put together our own square with the color our own choice and then put the quilt together with all the colors. I have not gotten that far yet. I have not decided what to do or how to put the quilt together yet. I am thinking wall hanging. Still pondering. I will upload and post the squares I have received when I have some time and inclination.

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!

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.

October Quiltie Square for RR

The color for the month was black. It has a lot of black in it. A lot of other contrasting colors as well. Black on black doesn't work for me. Notice the very cute flower sequins. They are perfect for 11/0 beads. The beads are just big enough so the sequins stay on - bead doesn't go through the sequin hole.

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.

Blue quiltie square for September

This is for an ongoing RR that I am hosting. We will put the quilt together when we are all done. That should be around the holidays. We should be done swapping by Nov/Dec. I love working with a single color every month. Quite a fun challenge for me. The first pict is before eyelets and the second one is after. I thought the middle needed just a little something. I am also getting better at the whole quilting thing. Yeah, I only started doing the fabric/quilting thing this year.

Elizabeth's purple quiltie square for ME!

This is my quiltie square for the month with the color theme - purple. It is soooo great looking in real life. I am going to have such a cool quilt when it is all done at the end of this year. Yeah, I could get started on the quilt now, but I think I will wait. I cannot see the composition in my mind without all the pieces. Elizabeth is a very talented textile artist. I consider myself a total newbie compared to the stuff she creates. She actually knows what she is doing when it comes to sewing. I make it up as I go along. BTW, I just stuck my finger again while sewing. No, I cannot use any type of thimble. Don't like losing any tactile sensations while working.

I had to get used to the lack of concrete focal points in fabric/quilt art. I was so used to having a person or thing as a focal point. Now, I hardly ever use my collage image sheets. I am still more literal in my focal image but I have a tendency to make my own image or use a found object. I so love the colors in this little quiltie. I could do a whole design composition lesson just with this quilt square.

Quiltie for Kelli

Ms. Kelli, if you are reading my blog. Stop now! Don't want to ruin the surprise. I don't want you to see it before I give it to you.

I am getting better at this art quilting thing. My stuff is coming out looking straighter than it has in the past. I know that I have not been sharing a lot of what I have been doing lately. The artwork I have been doing lately have been for articles and other people's websites. Some of them have a "No publishing on other sites" rule thing going on. So, whatcha think? I am pretty happy with it.

I had a hard time with this. It is always harder for me to create for someone else instead of myself. I have to think about what they would like and not only what thrills me. Of course, there are some little metal pieces in there. You will also see that I have been experimenting with some embroidery stitches. They are not perfect and I don't always do them the way I see them in the Embroidery Bible (which I love, BTW).

You will see lots of fabric paper in this little quiltie. I made it into a wall hanging so she could do something with it. This piece took me quite awhile to finish. I lost my muse on this for awhile and had to keep looking at it to decide what I wanted to do. The house part was easy. I was going to make it into a fabric book but that didn't work for me. So, I decided on a quiltie wall hanging. There is batting in the middle and a fabric back. If you look closely, the very top layer of my fabric background is tulle. I also did a little needle felting. I did not break out the machine for this. Just did it by hand. I usually don't work with purple a lot. The color has really grown on me. I might have to do more with that color. Don't you love those copper washers? They are my favorite little trinkets. They are used on airplanes or something like that. I got a boatload from eBay at a very, very good price. I love them!

Do you think she'll like it? I am going to nurse my migraine today. It has been unusually horrible today. All I want to do is sleep. Cannot tolerate any kind of noise.

Purple Quiltie Square for August

Tired from a busy first week of school. Here is my quiltie square for this month for the quiltie RR.

Purple-y enough? Gotta go to bed before I fall asleep here AGAIN!

I'm in Quilting Arts!

I never would have thought that I would be saying that a year ago. I was one of those people who would not have picked up a needle and thread or had owned a sewing machine. I learned how to sew in high school and made my own clothes and stuff for awhile, but it had been years since I had done that. Okay, maybe two or three decades. I only picked up a needle and thread to sew on a button or fix a tear. I don't know what made me want to start sewing and doing art quilts. I am thinking it was because I had had enough of paper techniques. I was at the point where I wasn't doing that much with it any more. Nothing was really new. I just kept doing the same thing but in a different way.

I still consider myself kinda a newbie at fabric/textile art. I still have a lot to learn. I tried the traditional quilting but could not get past cutting the pieces out. I ended up using those pieces in random quiltie pieces. There are a lot more possibilities for me with fabric, fibers, and surface design. The design factor is different as well. I can't explain it but design on paper for me is different than on fabric. I use fabric now in a lot of ways that I used to use paper but I design my pieces differently now.

Back to Quilting Arts, I have an article on page 64 on recycled wall hangings. I love how the magazine makes my pieces look better than they do in real life (my opinion, of course). The photography is great. I also have my go green! reader challenge piece on pg. 82. This is all in the new Quilting Arts issue #34. It is their go green! issue. You can also read about some my go green! ideas on their website:
http://quiltingarts.com/qamag/online_extra/waste-not.html

If you like my article, my going green! ideas on their website, and/or challenge quiltie, then please let Quilting Arts know. Their email for this is info@quiltingarts.com

Thanks! Comments welcome.

Quiltie RR - green for June and yellow for July

Yeah, I messed up June because my dimensions were off. I just redid it and did the yellow one at the same time. I just finished doing the embellishments late last night. You might think that I put a lot of thought into these quiltie squares. I have to tell you that I have no idea what I will do until I am actually about to do it. I have not planned for any of the squares. I just know what color it will be ahead of time. I rummage through my fabric stash to find the right color. I just start machine sewing. I do the sandwich thing. I cut out the right size. Yes, I checked this time. I zigzag the edges so that people can sew the squares together later. I think about what will go on top right when I am doing it. Yes, it does seem like I have the eyelet and flower combo going on right now. I cannot guarantee that theme will be there throughout the RR.

I finally got the Big Bite to work properly without it smashing my eyelets. I am not able to do placement with it as well as the handheld crop-a-dile. Not complaining though, it really gets in there in the middle of whatever so I can punch a hole through it or do an eyelet.

I hope my RR partners like it.

Quiltie RR - green was June's color

This is my quiltie square that I got from Linda Hartzig. It is better in real life. I love seeing how people interpret something. It is usually so different from my stuff.

I did a real "duh". I had done my green one to send out. I got an email telling me that my measurements were off. I measured the one I had at home and yes, it was off by an inch. Now, I need to go and redo green. Yes, I do know how to use a ruler. Don't you love that I make dumb mistakes, too? My 6th graders love that I am human.

Grid Ribbon

http://cgi.ebay.com/Set-of-31-MESH-GRID-ribbon-Fibers-Pastels-Primary_W0QQitemZ320115251738QQihZ011QQcategoryZ31733QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1638Q2em118Q2el1247

http://tinyurl.com/58nmmz link to eBay store in case top link is broken

I was surfing on eBay looking for I can't remember what and I came across this grid ribbon. I bought a sampler pack and then some other colors. I got this great color - copper! My favorite metallic color. I brought it on vacation with me to have something to do while watching TV in the room. You can click on the link to make the pictures larger. Yeah, my grid ribbon the right is not straight. When am I ever straight any way? Don't you love the little face peeking out from the middle of the flower? I did not want to put a button over her little face. The little quilties are for a project that I am working on. No rush though because I need to get stuff done for the infomercial this week. Leaving Friday afternoon. Triple EEEKS!!!

I thought I would share because this is a fun and very cheap way of embellishing. You could probably paint them, too.

Quilt binding

Hola! I just wanted to say very quickly that I appreciate all the comments about how you bind your quilts. I have opted for just a plain zigzag stitch. That does not mean that I won't keep trying. I will keep trying and will look at how other people do theirs. It will come, it always does. Thank you to all the quilters out there who shared with me their techniques, their thoughts, and their time.