I have had some time to get crafty! Look what I’ve been making!
a belated birthday and mothers day prezzie for my mom
my dad emailed me this pic of his belated birthday panel prezzie displayed on his cubicle wall
awful iPhone shot (there must have been schmutz on the lens) but you get the idea
These pieces are acrylic paint and spray paint on 5″ x 4″ canvas panels. First I painted each panel with a couple of coats of Liquitex acrylic paint, and then I used the Silhouette Digital Craft Cutter to cut out some stencils from freezer paper.
I ironed the freezer paper cutouts to the canvas panels, plastic side down. Freezer paper works like a dream with stencils because you can seal the edges to prevent leakage simply by ironing the stencil down. When you are ready to remove the stencil, it comes right off. The only difficulty I had was I had to keep ironing the freezer paper down in between coats of white spray paint. But I blame the $1.50 spray paint I was using that I got from Walmart. It was seriously lacking pigment. When I moved to black Krylon spray paint, it only took one or two coats to do the job. The white Walmart stuff took at least five coats.
The Silhouette cutter comes with some cutting designs pre-loaded, but the designs in the garden-themed panel trio above are ones I purchased from the online Silhouette store. The cool thing about the machine is that it works with your own font files, andyou can also make your own designs from images you have.
I am a huge fan of DaFont.com for their wingdings and dingbat fonts. The site has oodles of free themed dingbat fonts that I use all the time for a variety of projects. The font I used for the other two panels – the one for my dad and the one below it that I gave to Erik – is called “Happy Offsprings of Plankton” (see why I love this site? could a font have a better name?) and it’s by Gloomnshloom.
I’m looking forward to using the Silhouette in a LOT of upcoming projects, but my next project is going to be a quilt. There’s someone I want to make one for, but I’ll have to see how it turns out before I can commit to giving it to her. I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to quilting. I was finally able to start quilting the last quilt I put together – which must have been about a year ago. After a few attempts I gave up on doing any quilting in the workspace I had in Vallejo, and I was happy to discover that my workspace here makes quilting so much easier! While quilting this quilt I realized that I don’t really like it. So now I want to make a quilt I really do like.
I’m inspired by this amazing quilt I found on Kristen Lejnieks’ blog. An upcoming C&T Publishing author, Kristen has great style and taste. So I am going to try and duplicate this quilt, but with my own fabrics in blue and green. Try is the keyword there. Wish me luck!