adventures of a quilting diva

It’s true, I’ve been taking a vacation from blogging, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about my blog. I’ve been busy collecting new inspirations and ideas to share with you!

Here’s a peek at one of the most exciting things I’ve been doing recently: taping some episodes for the Creative Living with Sheryl Borden Show.

I thought it would be a breeze, since I’m used to teaching quilting and crafting techniques, but there are a few significant differences between TV and the live classroom. For one, your time limit is minutes, not hours. And two, if you mess up, you have to start all over from the very beginning. But Sheryl made the taping easy and fun, so I wasn’t stressed at all. I’m so excited to share my fabric cover-button techniques in hi-def!

dressing your coffee cup in style

blooming button jewelry to embellish clothes & quilts

vintage fabric fabric cover-button crafts

fun fabric appliques for card making & scrapbooking

These segments will air on Creative Living in 2011, but I’ll give you a YouTube preview soon!

More CHA fun! … Without further ado, here’s #1-5 of my top ten cool stuff at CHA 2010:

#5. Grungepaper Coat: Great patchwork coat made from scrapbooking Grungepaper. Check out the fab flowers on the detail photo!

#4. Petaloo Color Me Crazy: Fun paper, cotton, velvet and mulberry flowers to color and decorate for all your creative projects!

Take a closer look at some of what you can do with these flowers. I’d love to embellish some wearable art with Color Me Crazy flowers. What would you do with them?

#3. C&T Publishing’s Liquitex Soft Body Acrylic & Canvas Books: These are the terrific paints I did my CHA demo projects with. (Get the tutorials here: fabric painting | fabric ribbon rosettes.)

Lots of pigment, brilliant colors, and permanent with no heat setting required. Can be used for many different techniques.

Want a fun surface to paint on? Try these nifty canvas books! They’re ready for your creative touch.

#2. Rabinowitz Design Workshop’s Waxmelter Electric Batik Pen: How fun is this? Melt crayon bits or batik wax to make fabulous fiber art or scrapbook pages.

Drum roll, please … The most wonderful thing I found at CHA, the best thing ever for applique-quilters since fusible web …

hands and scissor free applique!

#1. Making Memories‘ Slice Craft Cutter: Why should scrapbookers have all the fun? Now the fantastic Slice craft cutter can cut fusible fabric appliques!

Place fusible-backed fabric and the Slice cutter onto the magnetic board, select your design, size, press the button and …

Voila! Fusible applique piece ready to be ironed to your background fabric. (Note: The Slice cutter does not dye your appliques and change their color for you. Two different fabrics are shown in these two photos.)And here’s a tea towel to show off the quick and easy Slice applique project. Want to see the Slice in action? (you know you do!) Check out this video from the Making Memories blog.)

That’s all for CHA 2010! Thanks for joining me! ^_^

Got boring fabric? Try some fabric painting fun to jazz it up a bit and turn it into something you actually WANT to use! Here’s the technique I’m giving a demo on at the Craft & Hobby Association’s 2010 Winter Trade Show today:

1. Start with some boring fabric. If you’re going to use it to make my fabric-painted rosettes, then cut it to be 18″ long. The piece below is about 9″ or 10″ by 18″. The enamel tray is great for containing the mess. Otherwise, you could cover your surface with freezer paper or plastic. (Tape it down taut for a smooth finish.)



2. Using a 1″ paintbrush and Liquitex Soft Body Acrylic Paint (the ones in the plastic jars) make random diagonal brushstrokes across the fabric. I used Brilliant Purple here. Dip the paint brush in a little water if you wish, but don’t use too much water at this point because you want to have some opaque areas that block the pattern and some translucent ones that let the pattern peek through. See the lighter sections of purple in the brushstrokes below? That’s where the paint is not watered down. This will dry opaque and cover the pattern. The darker parts of the brushstrokes with the pattern showing through have less paint and more water.
3. Now add more water to the paint to make a thinner consistency and cover the entire piece of fabric with a thin coat of paint. You can leave a few scattered sections of fabric unpainted if you wish.
4. Add in some more thicker areas of paint.
5. Use a stencil to add some bling. I used Liquitex Soft Body Acrylic in Iridescent Rich Gold. I’m stenciling right on the already wet/damp fabric. This will make the pattern slightly less distinct, but more interesting. The water also holds the stencil in place so it makes things easier in that respect: you don’t have to worry about the stencil shifting. Place it straight down, dab the paint into the holes, and lift it straight up again. Repeat as desired.



6. Next comes stamping. Use a paint brush to apply paint to foam stamps. Use less paint for a distressed look or completely cover the stamp for a complete image. If you start out with more paint you can stamp multiple times before reloading with paint and get ghost images. Just don’t put so much paint on the stamp that it oozes over the edges of the stamp. Stamp some images while the paint is still wet and then wait till it dries (or use a hair dryer like I do to speed up the process) and stamp some more to get distinct edges. Notice how the some of the purple checks are fuzzy. They were stamped onto wet fabric. The distinct checks were stamped after the fabric was dry.
7. Finally use a small paintbrush on dry fabric to add details. Outline bits and pieces of the design showing through as well as some of the images you stamped, or just doodle.

Voila! Now you have a fun piece of fabric to use for quilting, embellishing, and more! It would make a fabulous background for ATCs (artist trading cards) or fabric postcards. It would be great for an art quilt, but not so much for a quilt you’d want to snuggle with. Depending on how thickly you apply the paint, the fabric can come out a bit stiff. On the positive side, the painted fabric has more body and resists raveling. Tune in tomorrow to find out what I made with this piece of painted fabric (and get a tutorial too!)

Want more fabric painting fun? Check out Judi Hurwitt’s Rescuing Ugly Fabric post at the Approachable Art blog.

Just started on the beaded binding. I’ve got a deadline next week for this, so I’ve been working on little else. Here’s how it’s coming along:

Great guesses on what border fabric I chose! If it didn’t take so long to finish the panel, I would want to try them all out!

My border is a black-on-white polka dot. As I was embroidering I was actually thinking of a multi-color African print for the border, but somehow the polka dots jumped out at me when it came time to add the border. Then I decided to quilt the border with seed beads. … Speaking of seed beads, today’s tip is about choosing batting for beaded quilt wallhangings.

Check out the detail below. There are two different batting effects at play here:

I used black wool felt as the batting for the embroidery panel. Wool felt comes in several thicknesses and many different colors. (Choose a matching felt and if the fibers beard a bit you won’t notice it.) Wool felt is easy to pull the needle through and supports the beadwork very well.

The border was an experiment. It has two layers of Warm & Natural cotton batting. This also supports beadwork well, but gives a different effect. Look carefully and you’ll see that the nylon beading thread carried between the layers creates a bit of puckering like you would get on antique quilts (and new ones as well) when the batting shrinks in the wash. If you’d like the puckered antique look, but don’t want to wash your beadwork (dyed beads can bleed in the wash), this would be the way to go. I haven’t tested this technique with a single layer of cotton batting yet, I needed the heft of two layers to support the wool felt batting in the embroidered block.

The more beads you sew onto your quilt, the more support you’re going to need, so consider all your batting options (including non-traditional ones) before you begin beading. You could even sew a handful of beads on a sample sandwich or two to test the battings out first.

Here’s a tip for trying out new embellishment techniques: Make really small quilt sandwiches so you can get right to the fun stuff. This gives you a taste of the process as well as the satisfaction of finishing a project quickly. (The mini wall hanging on the right is just 4″ x 6″ without the beaded fringe.)

By the time you are finished with the mini, you will most likely be good enough at the technique to use it without fear on a quilt that you’ve already invested many hours in. You can decide if you like the technique enough to commit to a regular-size quilt. It will also help you decide which quilt to use the technique on.

If you try out different variations on many minis you will have a whole library of techniques (that you can see and touch) to choose from when it comes time to embellish your regular-size wall hangings. Of course you might just enjoy the small projects so much that you don’t want to go back to larger pieces. A group of minis artfully arranged on a wall would look fabulous!

I created this quilt as a sample for my new workshop, Bling Your Bindings! which is all about embellished binding techniques. The binding featured on this sample is Inside-Out Beaded Binding.

happy embellishing! =(^_^)=

Put your hands in the air where I can see them. … Much better.

While there is a time and a place for perfectly matched seams, there is also an equally important place for moving on and getting those quilt blocks completed. Just keep sewing and with practice you can achieve those perfect seams one day. In the meanwhile you don’t want to rip your fabric (and your patience) to shreds. Quilt-making should be enjoyable.

If that mismatched seam intersection bothers you too much, try covering it up with a well-placed button or bead. This little trick can be so much fun that once you master your piecing you might not want to give up the embellishing!
Ric-rac embellished seams are another nifty option.
What are your favorite cover-ups?

Donut beads are some of my favorite jewelry components. They also make fab art quilt embellishments. Here are a selection from my bead stash: clockwise from top center, 25mm Amethyst, 15mm Unakite, 14mm Green Aventurine, 20mm New Jade, 15mm Red Aventurine, 10mm Red Aventurine, 10mm New Jade, 15mm Leopardskin Jasper, 20mm New Jade (all donuts shown are from Fire Mountain Gems and Beads).There are 2 easy ways you can attach donut beads to a quilt without glue:
1). sew them to the quilt top with decorative thread or floss
2). hang them from a beaded dangle

Donuts as Surface Embellishment

Simply stitch through the donut’s hole with your favorite topstitching or pearl thread. You could even use fancy embroidery stitches or nylon beading thread and seed beads to stitch the stone donut down.

When beading a dangle, instead of using a single seed bead at the end of the dangle for a stop bead, string on enough beads to hold the stone donut and then bring the needle and thread back up through the rest of the beads on the dangle.
Donut beads are also made from glass, metal, shell and much more. What’s more, donut beads are calorie-free! =(^_^)=

Who is ready to have some fun?

Nancy Eha the Queen Mother of Royal Order of Bead Explorers, announces the Embellished Tiara Challenge. You can bead, paint, fuse, foil, collage, stitch, dye, anything goes! Just use the challenge tiara pattern and the challenge bead packet as a starting point.

There is no entry fee, but there are fantastic prizes. Two Viewers’ Choice fabric embellishment prize packages each worth over $200 will be awarded. Voting will be done by Nancy Eha’s eNews subscribers. Details about the Embellished Tiara Challenge can be found at Nancy Eha’s web site: www.beadcreative.com