Art & Soul Trades, Part Two

These heart pins were what I started out to blog about before Blogger became such a pig. It's bad enough that they've changed the way photos work so that you can't even move them around anymore. Now if you backspace in the wrong place, you can lose all of your photos which means you may as well start over or JUST NOT BLOG AT ALL! At a time when Facebook is just taking over people's lives, you'd think they would make it easier to blog!

BASTARDS!

The heart pins are for the girls from my Yahoo art group, TreasureArtTrends, named after the shop owned by two of the gals who are coming to Art & Soul, Keri and Cathy. Gina and Kathy are coming too and it is just TOO exciting!

Here are close-ups of the two bottle cap charms I made. I have about a dozen of the Dia de los Muertos caps and around twenty of the Las Vegas sign caps.

I'd made these in the past and just had the idea of touching up the Glossy Accents then adding the microbeads. They seemed to need something, you know? Like the Las Vegas sign ones just needed that tiny dot of sparkle at the top of the Las Vegas sign that the icicle colored Stickles provided. I love Stickles more even than the other Tim Holtz products and I pretty much love them all. OK, his masks are too large scale for my projects. They'd work better on tote bags and shirts but I never seem to have enough space on my work table cleared off to do those!By the way, I got a great hole punch at the bead store that works fabulously well for punching holes in bottle caps so you can add the jump ring. I wish I had time to sit and solder all of the jump rings closed. Ha! I wish I had the soldering skills to do that neatly!

Here's... Jackie Cardy!

These are wonderful machine embroidered brooches I purchased on Etsy earlier this year and thus began my acquaintance with Jackie Cardy, a marvelously talented embroiderer from Lancashire, England, UK. Her blog, DogDaisyChains, is a charming combination of things textile, gardening, pets, life in the country, and the things that only happen to Jackie (or so she thinks!). She writes articles on machine embroidery for the likes of Workshop on the Web (aka WOW) and Fibre & Stitch, so you know she is good at what she does. Also, she has done City & Guilds in embroidery, achieving a Highly Commended in the Awards for Excellence, and exhibits all over Britain. If you haven't come across her before, I suggest that you visit her blog, her Flickr, and her Etsy. Click on the photo above to see a much nicer photo on Jackie's Flickr of the brooch on the right.

Jackie finds it flattering and creepy at the same time to be spotlighted in someone's blog, so I'll send her an email and let her know before I publish this. I just wanted to make sure that anyone who reads my blog has a chance to become acquainted with her work. Buying those two lovely brooches from her inspired me to finally try my wings at some machine embroidery of my own.

I signed up for a fabric ATC swap on one of my groups, TreasureArtTrends. Here's an in-progress photo. I had to make 6 ATCs and send in 5 to get 5 back. The theme was summer. So I grabbed a piece of white cotton fabric from my stash and decided to try several new things at once. I watered down some acrylic paints to paint my motifs. These are Adirondack Daubers with colors watered-down but otherwise straight from the bottle.

I smooshed the lemonade yellow and citrus green onto the fabric to make the flowers and used a darker green (lettuce, I think) to make the leaves, then filled in the rest with a purply pink on a brush to make the background.

Here's a not very good photo of the result. As you can see, I used a purple (#40 weight) thread on top and in the bobbin to do some free-motion embroidery on it to define petals for the flowers and then centered each of them by spiraling out from where they met in the middle to make a center. I changed to a dark pink on top and fuchsia in the bobbin to free-motion in between the flowers. Not very expertly, I'm afraid, as I think that the height of my machine is not right for me to do this comfortably, which seems to be the key to doing free-motion quilting and embroidery properly.

I used a thin layer of quilt batting and a piece of tear away stabilizer on the back. I wanted the piece to be puffy and define the flowers better so I dug until I found a piece of thin batting that had been used as padding for a book that had been sent to me. (I couldn't find it when it was time to send the altered book on to the next person, but it turned up later, as you can see. Anyway, that's why I can't say what batting it is.) I cut a piece of stabilizer and put it through my inkjet printer to add the word 'Summer' to the front and stitched it on with a wheelbarrow charm. I printed out my contact info on another piece of stabilizer and stitched it to the back, then stitched between them and cut them apart to send along.

This was a way fun project and Jackie is the one who gave me the confidence to try it! Thanks, Jackie!