Month: March 2011

Finding Bargains

Last Friday morning I left for Evansville to do some shopping before heading over to Ferdinand to set up for Quilter’s Day Out.  My great niece has a birthday this week and I hadn’t gotten anywhere to get her some art supplies.  I found these awesome “things” in clearance and put the last 4 in my cart.  They are wonderful teal and curry colors, which are very popular with me.  I have not been much to decorate my house lately, but these things just sort of jumped out at me. I love the colors!

I was in the checkout all prepared to purchase everything in my cart.  The lady in front of me laid some floral thingies on the counter that caught my eye…she said they were on clearance too…for 50 cents each…so off I went in search of those.  I thought they were so interesting…sort of like the puff balls from gone-to-seed dandelions, but these were still yellow.  I found them and bought all that was left as well as throwing in some berry branches for nice contrast.  They were on clearance too.  I’m quite pleased with my new home decorations. Spring must be here.

Various And Sundry Things

By my calculations, it’s almost 10 years since I started dyeing my own cloth. Ten years…sounds like such a long time!  Actually it’s the same amount of time we have been living here in southern Illinois.  It was 10 years ago this month or in April (can’t remember which), that I took a dyeing class…and it’s been uphill ever since.  Wow. 10 years.  I feel like such a pro!

What else have I been doing?  In between shows and teaching I do get to play around once in a while.  A couple of weeks ago I tried my hand at embossing black silk velvet. I used a rubber stamp with hand writing on it…cool, huh!

Naw…you’re not supposed to be able to read it!

At the Bloomington quilt show, my demo helper was a bit shy about trying to paint a face with Tsukineko inks, so I took the plunge.  It’s actually easier than I thought it would be.  I used a tracing of a face, so how hard is that?  Start with the lightest colors and work your way up.  She is actually not finished as I will do  more highlighting and shading on her and I haven’t painted the eyebrows yet, but I think she is a pretty cool redhead.  This was painted using aloe vera gel mixed with the inks, a trick from the ever cool Judy Coates Perez.

She has red sparkles in her hair too….I’m going to share how that was done in a minute.

Here is the fish I painted using Tsukineko inks.  At the Bloomington show, someone reminded me of something I had wanted to make a sample of…I simply added it to my fish sample…

Bo-Nash bonding agent is a fusible that comes in a can and you sprinkle it like salt.  It even looks like salt!  So I sprinkled it in some places on the water and in the redhead’s hair, then laid some foil over it, heated it with an iron…and voila!  Sparkling sprinkles!  This is very fun.  And I sell the Bo-Nash fusible and the foil, so call me or email if you want some. I think I will start putting sparkles on lots of stuff now…this is just way too easy.