Common Life into ART

Potholders are Fun

2009-12-21T06:57:00.004-05:00

It's true that I've been in sort of a functional craft mode lately. Never discount the pleasure to be had in simple, traditional handiwork like knitting, crochet and sewing. Whether the end result is "artsy" or merely useful, there is something so satisfying about taking a piece of cloth or a skein of yarn and transforming it. For a gift exchange I utilized a variety of skills in progress. I crocheted some dishcloths in gorgeous chartreuse and sky blue, created some dish towels by adding matching patchwork fabric to the ends of a length of utility cloth, and whipped up some crazy log cabin quilted potholders. That was so much fun that I made some additional potholders for another friend. I found a use for some of my Spoonflower fabrics and other bits of delightful cloth in my scrap bin. These are, to me, small works of art.

Doughnuts Finis!

2009-12-21T06:54:00.002-05:00

I finished these crazy crocheted doughnuts. There is something about making a dozen of something that feels complete. Generally I like to make at least three of a thing to really get the feel of it--but tradition requires a dozen when the subject is faux baked goods. Breakfast anyone?

Stitchpaper Ornaments

2009-12-18T20:01:00.005-05:00

I've been doing a lot of crafting for Christmas, which is a nice change of pace. Several ornaments were created, including some stitchpaper doughnuts and stars for library staff and friends. I like to make different shapes and stuff them--it keeps me amused.

Stitchpaper Squares Via Post

2009-12-05T09:57:00.002-05:00

Denise at MMArtFriends on Yahoo swapped out these great stitchpaper squares and they are all fabulous. I will have to do something really fun with them after I finish embellishing them. Thanks everyone who participated--it's so cool to see all the different papers from various creative minds!

Doughnuts are the New Pink

2009-12-05T09:55:00.002-05:00

Yes, it IS my doughnut phase! I crocheted a dozen doughnuts for fun. Found a free pattern on the Internet and used cotton yarn. I'm finishing up the beading sprinkles and will post a photo when they are done.

Impromptu Studio Space

2009-12-05T09:51:00.002-05:00

Here's my impromptu studio for my day off from work. I'm in the middle of a top secret project. This kitchen island is just the right height for working, so I love it. Right next to the coffee maker (Keurig) too! And I can keep an eye on the little couch potato who is coming down with the flu.

Art Around the House

2009-11-19T20:57:00.003-05:00

I've actually put some of my quilts and things on the walls this week, so here are a couple of photos of the living room/dining room. I've had so much art sitting on the shelf and don't know why I never really thought to put it out for display! It's always fun to see into other people's houses.

Pagelets

2009-11-19T20:37:00.003-05:00

I'm calling these little paintings pagelets because they're each done on a book page that's been dyed with ink. I drew the images, painted with acrylics and then thread sketched them with black thread. I actually hung one up in my house. I'm getting braver.

Zentangledoodling

2009-11-19T20:35:00.003-05:00

I loved the fun article in CPS about Zentangles, so when I went away to a library conference last week I made my notes into doodles.

Colorful Totes

2009-11-19T20:30:00.002-05:00

I've just been in a painting mood lately. It all started with these cute totes I got at Hot Topic (the only place we shop). They're just plain white and they were on sale for a dollar, so I picked them up for a song. I used acrylic paints mixed with textile medium.

THANK YOU!

2009-10-30T15:16:00.003-04:00

You know who you are. All of you who have purchased Stitch Alchemy and all of you who have posted projects, reviews and comments or written to me directly. The book is ranked #1 in sewing, #1 in papercrafts and #1 in needlework on Amazon. Everyone over to my house for an icecream party!!!!! You deserve it. My heartfelt thanks for the wonderful reception. I am so honored.

Stitched Acrylic Paintings

2009-10-30T15:12:00.002-04:00

My second round of acrylic paintings. I moved from stretched canvas to watercolor paper, which is less intimidating! When they were dry I stitched around the lines. Just for fun. I haven't really done much painting for painting's sake, so it makes a nice break.

Stitchpaper Express

2009-10-18T21:47:00.003-04:00

I've been working with the Stitch Alchemy book study group on Mixed Media Art Friends and we're working on week 2,3,4, which is coloring our original paper/cloth or stitchpaper with inks, paints, stains and glazes. I've been so impressed with all the creativity and beautiful work everyone is doing. Here are my sheets of colored stitchpaper, ready for the next stage.

The Family That Stencils Together...

2009-10-15T11:36:00.003-04:00

I was so impressed with these stencils my 16 year-old made--and the coolest part is that she stenciled me on her wall across from her bed. Isn't that sweet? One is me and the other is her with her sister. She made the stencils out of cardstock and the images are spray painted on black cardstock. She's one talented teen :)

The Best Part--Serendipity!

2009-10-11T23:07:00.003-04:00

I've been making stitchpaper like mad and will be posting week 2 results for the book study. Does it sound crazy to be in a book study for the book you wrote? It's a great motivation for me to make art! Anyway, here's what's so fun about being creative. This is a sampling of the paper towels and newspapers under my work. I've ironed them out and they're ready for some other project. I especially like to wrap gifts in the inked paper towels and tie them up with lovely fibers. Both kinds of serendipity paper look nice wrapped around paper beads. Just wait til we start stamping and such!

Stitch Alchemy Book Study and a free gift!

2009-10-06T11:04:00.006-04:00

I'm so excited that uber-artist Belinda Spiwak (aka crazyartgirl and alteredbelly) is running a book study on Stitch Alchemy, that I've decided to play along at her generous invitation. There is already a LOT of alchemy sizzling over on Mixed Media Art Friends. The group begins this week and they're creating stitchpaper like crazy. You can read Belinda's instructions or find mine on pages 14-18 of the book.

Here is the schedule for playing along:
Week of Oct. 4: Create basic fabric/paper (stitchpaper) p. 14-18
Week of Oct. 11: Inviting Juiciness p. 24-27
Week of Oct. 18 and 25: Coloring with Paints and Glazes p. 29-34
Week of Nov. 1: Metallics p. 35-38
Week of Nov. 8: Chalks and Markers p. 39, Reducing and Removing Color p. 40-41
Week of Nov. 15: Casting Chance p. 42-45
Week of Nov. 22: Texturizing p. 4-49, Masks and Resists p. 50-51
Week of Thanksgiving: art school is out for the holiday!
Week of Dec. 6: Printmaking Techniques p. 52-53
Week of Dec. 13: Effects p. 54-57
Week of Dec. 20: Crafted Whimsy p. 58-62, Journaling p. 63-64, Baubles etc. p. 64-65

I'm going to offer a gift to anyone who'd like to participate in this study. If you join the group and "add" yourself to the book study (just let the group know you're in), then post at least one picture of some stitchpaper/cloth-paper you've made or a technique you've tried from the book to the shared files, I'll mail you a little something from my studio. The enthusiasm is contagious. MMART Friends is a big Yahoo group who do all kinds of mixed media, so only those interested will be taking part in the Stitch Alchemy book study.

You can also sign up for a swap--we're trading good fortune birds, love dolls and some 6" squares of stitchpaper so far. Hosts/hostesses are welcome!

There's plenty of time to get involved. I've got some plain stitchpaper brewing up today and we'll be decorating it through the rest of the year, then trading projects at the first of the new year.

To get your giftie from me...join up and as soon as you've posted a pic of your work to the shared files, email me with your name and address at kellininaperkins on gmail. I'll be working along with the schedule and will mail out gifts as I finish them.

Sketch to GIMP

2009-09-13T22:13:00.004-04:00

If you haven't heard me mention it before, I really love the FREE software called GIMP, which stands for GNU image manipulation program. It's a delightful FREE program with most of the bells and whistles you'll find in photoshop. There is so much to it that I only know how to use a handful of tools. I've been playing with scans of sketches and here's tonight's result. The black and white was the original paper drawing with a marker. I scanned it and saved it as a jpg, then did some fills and spraypaint with GIMP. Easy as pie! Mmmm....in the mood to draw some pie now.

Oops I Blurbed

2009-09-11T17:34:00.006-04:00

As you can tell, I've been playing with web tools lately. There is so much out there for customizing everything from fabrics to fonts. My latest toy is Blurb and I've apparently become a "blurbarian" without much effort. Okay, maybe a day or two's work pulling together photos. I decided that it would be nice to have a compendium of the last few years' worth of artwork at a glance, so I knocked together a 194 page book filled with art. This represents at least my favorite, if certainly not all my work. So on rainy days I can be sure that I have, in fact, been doing something with my time besides biting my nails. Now, of course, I want to create some more (much smaller) original books. There is a link to the book on the right hand side of the blog--it's titled "art. stitch. life." This is just a photo book of art--no text. The software is easy to use and I'd recommend this site if you want to put something special together.

Wordle Me a Riddle

2009-09-10T14:05:00.003-04:00

Made this neat little ditty on wordle . It's a cloud, based on the first page of el bloggo. Make love dolls and lots of kitty holding and fabric fusion!

Art Skins

2009-08-16T14:15:00.003-04:00

I found out that you can make skins for your high tech toys, so I immediately ordered one for my phone. This is a piece of art that I uploaded to Snapfish and manipulated to get it where I wanted it on the phone. You can also make them for your pc, so that may be next. Now my phone is also my art!

Paper Cloth Names and Winner

2009-08-16T13:56:00.003-04:00

Wow--what a lot of fabulous ideas! I love many of them and others make me laugh with prior associations. Some of them I can't pronounce! Here's the final list: clothinpaper, material medium, altered paper, mache, fusion material, colabric, paperic, papyric, papterial, fiber too, papclo, clopap, clotper, fiber-cloth, faber, faper, pafab, plypaper, kelliabric, celluabric, papyrmus, fabaper, sewpaper, papersew, artfabric, stitchpaper, papertex, fabricpaper, paperfabric, caliper, fabricaper, quilting paper, sewable paper, fusion fabric, othpa, re-cloth, cloper, woper, fiper, paber, capag, capgu, woven paper, structural paper, foundation paper, fabpaper, paperized fabric, paperized plypaper. Whew! I'm leaning HEAVILY towards stitchpaper for probably obvious reasons. I love the word stitch. But I also like fusion material, material medium, quilting and sewable paper and I love paperized fabric. I'm gonna still mull it over for a bit, but the winner of the DVD is vintage rock chick Gill! She has an awesome blog so check it out (see her link in the comments).

I've been working on some paper-cloth projects like this journal purse and enjoying the summer!

Our EMT Girl

2009-08-04T12:08:00.005-04:00

Things were pretty exciting around here last week when my 18 year old became a certified EMT (Emergency Medical Technician)! She was nail-biting over the nationals. We helped her study and it was an impressive amount of information from every working system in the body to drug interractions, plus legal issues and just generally what to do in every emergency situation you've heard of and tons you never imagined. She's off to paramedic school next month. We are very proud of her!

Peace, Bake, Sew Stuffies

2009-08-04T13:41:00.004-04:00

I finished my personal stuffies printed at Spoonflower. Each was cut out, embroidered, beaded and stuffed. We have Peace Kitty (holding a birdie) and Peace Birdie (holding a kitty); Bake Birdie and Bake Kitty holding cupcakes; and Sew Birdie and Sew Kitty holding enormous spools of thread. I love doll forms but like for them to stand up, so I ended up making my own stands as I have done in the past. These were super simple. I created a small pocket on the back of the doll and stitched it on. The stands are simple shapes from the wood aisle at Hobby Lobby...a round beveled base, some wooden spools and dowels that fit into the spools. The spools are glued to the base and the dowels cut to 6" and inserted into the spools with glue. I used E6000 because I don't like to clamp and wait for regular wood glue. For a couple of bucks you can have personalized doll stands easy as pie. Paint them any color you'd like!

Holiday Gifts 2009

2009-08-04T11:30:00.005-04:00

The Quilting Arts Holiday Gifts Issue is available for pre-order now. I made these delicious no-cal cookie pins for all you sugar addicts out there. We might as well wear our passions on our chests. Cookies. Yum! This ish looks great--check out the link. I WILL be making Melanie Testa's cool name badge holders, as I am always going to conferences and wearing those geeky clear plastic monstrosities. Can't wait to see what else is in there!

What's In a Name Giveaway

2009-07-28T19:59:00.005-04:00

In case you missed it (and if you don't subscribe to Cloth Paper Scissors online Embellishments newsletter, you missed it), I did a brief interview about this thing we refer to as paper-cloth or cloth-paper. It's both, really, so what to call it? We discarded Maper (material-paper) and Ploth (paper cloth) as too clunky. I'd love to come up with a great term that describes it, so I'm eliciting suggestions here.

Because I need to celebrate so many things...Stitch Alchemy has been hovering around the #1 spot in quilting, sewing and papercrafts on Amazon; this is my 500th blog post and our awesome Mustang Bullitt just won a trophy (unrelated but I'm still celebratin'), I want to give something away if you'll post your naming ideas in the comments.

I'll pick a random name as the giveaway winner on August 15 and mail them a copy of the Quilting Arts Workshop: Stitch Imagery DVD. This is a one hour dvd that will show you how to turn a photo into fabric art. If you already have that, we'll work out a deal for something else! Because I can't for the life of me figure out how to request your email address in my comment box, consider following me on twitter. I'll announce the winner here and there.

The first suggestions come from Debra A: CLOTHINPAPER or MATERIAL MEDIUM or ALTERED PAPER. All very compelling. What ya got for me?