Studio Kit

I'm off for about a week - see you soon!

(or holiday celebration of your choice)

In case you haven`t figured it out already - this will be a non-quilting related post . :) A teensy how-to follows though, for these and a few other little Christmas decorations I made for my office.

All of my materials are from the dollar store, which means that I`ve spent no more than $2 on any one item.

The simplest of course, was the vase of flowers. The flowers were purchased by individual stem at $1.00 each, the vase was $2 and the sand and vase filler were simply layered in like a parfait. Easey peasey!

In the first pic, there is a vase of the same size beside the one with the flowers. In it is a little tree in some vase filler. The tree started out like this:

and then I used a utility scissor to cut the plastic pot it was inl; and then cut the bottom of the pot out so that the tree would have a little stand.

Although the tree was still quite small, it was too tall for my vase, so I used a wire cutter to trim the tree stump, which I then put back in its stand for stability.

Mes voila!

I used the same simple process for this shorter, rounder vase; as well as come clippings from the Christmas pics in the first materials shot and made this little pretty:

Since these are so quick and easy to make (less than an hour for all three), if you like them, you can whip a couple up for your coffee or sofa table, or even a centerpiece for your kitchen table and still have plenty of time to finish whatever else needs to be done between now and Saturday.

See you Wednesday!

This is just a little something I've been playing with on my kitchen table. "Kitchen table" you ask? Why yes! Haven't I mentioned that my sewing room currently looks like THIS:

the walls are primed...

that closet door is now primed too...

sadly, there's nothing I can do to make that window bigger...

and we're laying the floor this weekend. AND THEN, paint, furniture goes back in, fabric goes back in - I'm hoping that shortly after Christmas, I'll be back in business!

This was a piece I made several months ago. I was experimenting with a number of techniques, (not purposely, mind);I was trying to create the effect of trees in the background, mid-ground and foreground, so, using some of my hand-painted fabric; I quilted it to death, painted over, painted under, quilted some more, fused on top of, and I think, did a final layer of paint - all in an effort to make it look the way I saw it in my head - and failed utterly.

So I called it "Failure To Thrive" (a play on both words and the utter failure of the piece) and put it away. I never actually intended to show it to you, though the sharper eyed among you may have spotted it in this post ( like all my failures, I never give up on the - I always try to rescue them, make them over, prove that they can be beautiful despite themselves.)

I'm showing it to you today because it's part of a project I'm working on that will be revealed in the new year. Rayna Gilman is involved... and you can play too. Pick up her new book or enter here for a chance to win a free copy.

Talk soon!

I finally got my laptop back (it was actually ready 7 days before I was able to pick it up, but due to a miscommunication in house, they kept telling me it wasn't. ARGH.)

In the meantime, I was working on lots of stuff, but first up, playing with plastic!

Over on And Then We Set It On Fire, this month's technique is fusing plastic. So I played with this technique over the weekend, using grocery bags, dry cleaner wrapping, thickened plastic wadding and bubble wrap.

Mostly, I just melted stuff together. :)

I was interested in the types of textures I could get with the different weights of plastic; but because the dry cleaning plastic would have been excessively boring, I first put down two squares as a base, mixed up some craft paint on top, put another two squares of plastic on that and melted away.

Four layers wasn't enough, but 8 was, and I got some really nice results that were highly coloured, very pliant, and easy to quilt.

I also tried it with some white grocery bags for a less vibrant result, but in my finished piece, I layered the different kinds of plastics and some of the colours together.

I also tried putting "stuff' in between the layers: sequins, tiny beads, bits of fabric, plastic mesh and the like - with varied results - I may use those bits and bobs in other pieces in the future:

But often, the result was such a hard mass of plastic, I couldn't imagine using it in any way except possibly, sculpture!

It's not clear from the pic above - but this turned out be a lump of hard plastic that I wouldn't be able to get a needle through.

In the end, I took some pinks and greens and whites, (and little of the grey with sequins) cut them up, layered them and put them together in a little wall hanging. BSP *LOVES* it and thinks I should work with melted plastic all the time. It was fun - but that's enough for me. :)

My little darling is now in the shop - the scanner got rid of "70 known threats" but there were 102 found!

I love that a service such as The Geek Squad exists, but they're not cheap! $314 up front (to get rid of the virus, and save my files) and possibly more when I pick her up. Sheesh!