Join me on a Hawaiian Island Quilt Cruise for a Cause
This October come with me for a painting and surface design adventure on an island hopping Quilt n’ Cruise to Hawaii. A really wonderful aspect of this cruise, is that a portion of the proceeds go to funding breast cancer research. Beyond contributing to such a wonderful cause, what could be more inspiring than a cruise [...]
Day 3 Heavy Metal Play Day
The saturday metal class was fantastic! Walnut Hollow recently changed the size of their metal squares from 4″ x 4″ to 5″x 5 3/4″, and this larger size really opened up the creative potential for embossing. My students had so much fun, creating fantastic designs, check out all their beautiful work (click on the photos [...]
Fun Metal Workshop and a Rough Drive Home
On thursday, I drove 85 miles to Rockford, IL to give two lectures and teach Heavy Metal Play Day. I don’t teach locally very often so it was really nice to drive instead of dealing with the hassles of flying. There was lots of fun experimenting with different embossing techniques on silver and colored aluminum, [...]
Folk Art Inspired Ornament
What you’re going to need 4″ square Walnut Hollow aluminum and cardboard from packageembossing toolribbon for hangingred paintpaint brushdecorative craft scissorspaper scissorshole punchE-6000 glue or similar adhesiveAdirondack alcohol inks and blending solution (optional) Click on the heart image to open a full size jpg on another web page. Drag image onto your desktop and print [...]
Magical Metal Altars at Create
Thursday I taught Magical Metal Altars to a full class with 20 students. This is a new class, kind of a larger modified version of the popular Fiesta Ornaments. What fun this was! I gave the students a wide range of options to create their altar; from using a template with everything predesigned by me [...]
Painting Fabric Class at the Create Retreat
The Create retreat got off to a wonderful start on Wednesday. My first class had 8 students, it’s such a pleasure to have a class that small on occasion, teaching 25 (my usual number for festival) can be challenging, because I always like to give everyone individual attention along with the class demos. These gals [...]
Heavy Metal in Long Beach
Heavy Metal Play Day is a day of fun and exploration; embossing and adding color to metal in a variety of ways, working with both aluminum and copper. It was another great workshop at International Quilt Festival. Tweet
St Paul Day 3: Metal Workshop
free motion quilting designs were this students inspiration for the peice with the leaves My third class in St. Paul was Heavy Metal Play Day, I was so excited to finally have the opportunity to teach this class after planning it almost 2 years ago. The first half of the class we concentrated on working [...]
Make it University Samples
I modified the design of the Metal Magic project somewhat for the workshop in Long Beach, making the kits with a piece of white cotton fabric (on right) for making the image transfer. I thought some people may prefer that look to the canvas, but I am bringing squares of canvas for people to use [...]
One month until Copper book retreat!
If you are like me you have been feeling that low grade stress building for months. I know I could really use a little creative get away. Want to spend a weekend in the woodlands of Wisconsin making copper and canvas mixed media books with me? The weekend of August 8-9, I will be sharing [...]
Sewing plastic bags
That’s right, I am sewing plastic bags. I am putting kits together for my MIU Metal Magic workshop for Long Beach. In the kits I include 4 mini brads with all the other supplies. During my last workshop a few people lost a brad when opening the kit.I looked to see if I had some [...]
Busy with not much to show for it.
Isn’t summer supposed to be that time when we pull out those lazy days “summer reading” books and lounge around sipping iced tea? Here in Chicago it is overcast and rainy, a little cool, and I have had too much to do. My son is taking a really great cultural anthropology class that has had [...]
Birds & Bees copper book
This is the finished copper book that I worked on embossing during Open Studios.I decided to make a change to the books by backing the copper covers with painted grungeboard for extra stability. I really like the addition, giving the books a sturdy and clean finish.
Flora: Copper & Canvas Book
I will give a brief description of the materials used on each page. On the first page there are leaves cut and painted from a phone book page with a leaf cut from a leftover of my mixed media quilt Illustrated Document No. 1. Sprout painted with textile paint on fabric, next page black and [...]
Metal and Canvas Books
I began by tearing canvas into 4″ x 8 ” pieces and painting both sides with gesso. I think if I were to start again I would tear them into 4 ” x 8 1/2″ pieces to allow for the bulk of paint and collage. When the pages were folded in half the book [...]
More Metal work
This is the bee panel partially done. In this photo I have gone over all my lines on the front side of the metal with the pointed stylus and begun adding some stippling with the tiny ball stylus to the background on the left side. This helps the image to pop up and be defined.In [...]
Little Mixed Media Books
I am working on making a couple small canvas books with copper metal covers. I am using 4 inch square copper metal, it is a heavier weight metal than the aluminum I use for Fiesta Ornaments. I have drawn several designs to use for front and back covers for two books, one titled Flora, the [...]
Dream Houses- more how-to details
This is one of my favorite house views not seen in the magazine. In this months Cloth Paper Scissors magazine you can find the directions for making my Dream Houses also referred to as the bird houses. There are a lot of steps to making these and in fairness to the other contributors of the [...]
The Raven King
Dick Blick was having a sale a couple weeks back with canvases half price. How could I pass up cute little 4″ canvases for $2.50 each? Unfortunately I forgot to gesso my canvas before I started painting, so there are little bumpies, it has been a long time since I have painted on canvas. I [...]
A Chicken for Laura
Back in May Laura Wasilowski and Frieda Anderson had birthdays and I made them each a tin quiltlet. Laura loves and collects chickens and Frieda loves her dog George, now famous for helping Frieda break her ankle a day before her trip to Australia earlier this year while chasing a squirrel.Saturday we will be celebrating [...]
