Upcoming classes- summer and fall

It is hard to believe July is already here and that means International Quilt Festival Long Beach is only a few weeks away! This year I am teaching three classes, doing open studios and a Make it University workshop. If you are planning on going to festival this year it would be great to see you, please stop by and say hi or better yet come dabble with some paint in one of my classes.

here's my line up:

International Quilt Festival, Long Beach

Thursday, July 22
Mixed Media Painted Fabric
Using textile paints, gel medium and decorative printed paper images create a fun versatile fabric that can be used to make tote bags, fabric bowls, vessels, sculptural objects or book cloth.

Friday, July 23- 10 am-12 pm Open Studios
3pm- MIU workshop: 
Embossed Metal Origami Pop Up Book
Using aluminum craft metal, simple embossing, alcohol inks and paper we will create a fun little art book, using the fundamentals of origami to create expanding pop up pages. These are so cool, easy to make and they make awesome little gifts.

Friday July 23, 6-9 pm
Fiesta Ornaments
Inspired by Mexican tin folk art, these fun and festive ornaments incorporate painting with textile paints, quilting, embossing and sewing metal.

Saturday, July 24
Painting Fabric for Whole Cloth Quilts
From adding details, dimension or shadow to creating fully illustrated scenes, paint offers endless 
opportunities for creating special effects on fabric. Working with various types of fabric paints you will learn different techniques for applying paint to fabric, creating smooth gradations of color and adding fine lines and details.


Whispering Woodlands, Wisconsin

I am really excited to be teaching at Whispering Woodlands retreat center, in beautiful Verona, Wisconsin, just west of Madison this summer.

Saturday, August 14
Tsukineko All Purpose Inks
Tsukineko Inks have a broad range of applications for painting fabrics. You'll learn effective blending and shading techniques, working with wet and dry brush application methods. You will be amazed at what these inks can do.

Sunday August 15
Heavy Metal Play Day
Spend a day working with craft metal and discover a variety of ways you can add flash to your mixed media projects. Learn several embossing techniques, working with an assortment of tools to create designs with dimension and texture on aluminum and copper. Methods for joining metal  to other media and adding color with alcohol inks will also be explored.

Each student will receive a Creative Metal Tool kit ($29 value) and aluminum and copper metal courtesy of Walnut Hollow.


CREATE Retreat, Rosemont, Illinois

As summer winds down and we transition into fall, get another few days of creative time in at Interweave's first mixed media Create retreat in the Chicago area.

Thursday August 26, 6-9 pm
Tea & Ephemera
Your mixed media cup will runneth over when you join me Thursday evening August 26th from 6-9 pm for tea. We will explore a number of ways to add visual texture and imagery to mixed media work with tea bags, yes, I said tea bags! rubber stamps, painted and printed fabric, paper scraps, paint sticks and colored pencils.

Saturday August 28, 9 am-4 pm
Fiesta Ornaments
Inspired by Mexican tin folk art, these fun and festive ornaments incorporate painting with textile paints, decorative stitching, embossing and sewing metal.  These make excellent gifts for the holidays, so get a jump start on that holiday giftmaking with this workshop.

Sunday August 29, 9-12 pm
Tea & Ephemera  FULL
Your mixed media cup will runneth over when you join me Thursday evening August 26th from 6-9 pm for tea. We will explore a number of ways to add visual texture and imagery to mixed media work with tea bags, yes, I said tea bags! rubber stamps, painted and printed fabric, paper scraps, paint sticks and colored pencils.  



International Quilt Festival, Houston

I just heard the catalog for Quilt Festival, Houston is arriving in the mail this week, this is what I will be teaching there:

Tuesday, Nov 2
Tsukineko All Purpose Inks
Tsukineko Inks have a broad range of applications for painting fabrics. You'll learn effective blending and shading techniques, working with wet and dry brush application methods. You will be amazed at what these inks can do.

Wednesday, Nov 3
Color Theory
Did you know the color choices you make can transform an average piece of artwork into something spectacular? Be surprised and delighted by the effects and illusions you can create by understanding the mysteries of color. In this hands-on experiential class you'll learn key color concepts with visual examples, mix new paint colors, and create helpful charts, all providing you with the tools you’ll need to see color in a whole new light.

A trip to DeKalb, IL

I have lived in Chicago almost 5 years and sadly I had not been more than 30 miles west of the city, until Thursday when I drove out to give a lecture and teach a workshop to the DeKalb Country Quilters guild.

It was a challenging drive with one of the freeways under construction slowed to a standstill, then I ended up making multiple detours after getting off the freeway only to end up with slow traffic on several routes due to down traffic lights and road closures as crews removed fallen trees from the storm the night before. After I got out of the extended city suburbs the roads were free and clear through lovely green farm land dotted with barns and silos.

The DeKalb quilters made me feel very welcome despite my nontraditional take on quilting and on friday we had a great class with painting for whole cloth quilts.

Gorgeous color, huh?

Everyone did beautiful work and we had a great space to work in, what more can anyone ask for.

The calm after the storm

We have had some crazy turbulent weather this week. Yesterday evening around 5 we had a front come through with powerful thunderstorms churning up tornadic activity in many parts of the Chicago area. It even set off the sirens for a short period downtown, which doesn't happen too often, but also happened on friday. Luckily, the majority of the storm passed through fairly quickly and left an amazing colorful sunset.

Today, I am off to the western suburbs to give a lecture and teach at the DeKalb Country Quilters Guild and the sun is shining with no threat of storms, yay!

More Vintage Illusion- a mini tutorial

In the last week or two I have seen a lot of these butterflies in my neighborhood.  This one landed on the side of our building and I love the way the orange matched perfectly with the brick.

I snapped this photo with the camera on my phone and threw it into photoshop to crop it square. I decided to play around with adding the illusion of making it look like it was taken with an old camera using a ttv (through the lense) filter. You can find a few here that blogger Hush Mama has generously uploaded to share.

If you have photoshop or a similar program that allows you to work with layers you can create this effect by starting with one of your photos.

Then take a jpg of a ttv lense

and layer it over your image in photoshop and stretch it to fit the same size as your photo, then go over to the layers menu on the right side of your screen and select multiply.

That will merge the two images together to make this vintage looking photo.

Check out Alma's latest tutorial

Alma Stoller has just posted another tutorial making colorful paper flowers to incorporate into mixed media projects.

Tutorial Tsunami day 4 the wave hits shore

A tutorial for printing on tea bags

I have a large bowl that sits on my counter that I toss my tea bags in after I use them. When it gets to the point where it is overflowing, kind of like now, I tear each one open and dump out the tea.

Then I flatten them out and put them in large ziplock bags.

I am saving tea bags not only for my own use, but also for my upcoming Tea & Ephemera workshops at Create in August.

I really like the tea bags that are folded in half with a staple at the top because they make a nice sized piece of paper and if you are lucky you can gets some pretty nice little labels too. Good fodder for collage.

Here are two types of tea bags opened up to show the size and shape of the paper.

In the Tea and Ephemera workshop we are going to be playing with several different ways to use the lowly tea bag as an artistic component in mixed media textile collage.

Why the tea bag? Well, tea bags are a thin light weight paper that is translucent allowing one to see through them, they have a lovely tea stained patina giving them a vintage paper look and they are so thin that when it is adhered to fabric it literally disappears. It also has the benefit of being paper so media like inks and colored pencils work beautifully on them.

One of the things that is fun to do with tea bags is print on them. The way to do this is scan an image into your computer or find some copyright free imagery on the net, and print it out on your printer. I have a black and white toner printer that I bought for this purpose, because toner ink will not bleed if it gets wet the way ink jet will.

Place a tea bag over the  printed image and tack it in place with a small piece of scotch tape on each corner.

Place the paper with the tea bag on it in the paper tray in the correct position to print out, usually it is face down top of paper going into the printer first. To double check place an x or other mark on a blank piece of paper and print your image on it, making note of how you placed the paper in the paper tray and the direction of the image when it came out.

Here is the printed tea bag, ready to be collaged.

Another thing to try, is printing a color image on a tea bag.

This is a photo I took recently at a garden center and altered in Photoshop.

Follow the same procedure as with the black and white toner image, lining up the tea bag on the printed photo and tape in place.

After printing out the image spray a coat of fixitive on the tea bag to keep image bleeding to a minimum when adhering it to the fabric. I usually use gel medium to glue the tea bags to my fabric, but in this case I might opt for using Mistyfuse.

If you want to spend an evening exploring multiple ways of using teabags in your art, join me Thursday, August 26, 6:00-9:00 pm at Create here in Chicago.


Now go over to Gloria's blog for a tutorial on Shibori with fabric paint

Then over to Alma's blog for a tutorial on recycling magazines.

Thanks for riding the wave with us. Here's a list of all the other artist tutorials participating in this tsunami.

Melanie Testa

Jane LaFazio

Alisa Burke

 Kelli Perkins

Tracie Huskamp

Diana Trout

Lyric Kinard

Alma Stoller

Gloria Hansen

Tsunami day 3

Kelly, author of Stitch Alchemy, is riding the wave with her tutorial on spoon poetry, don't you love those colors, Kelly is the queen of color!

along with Tracie Lynn who also has a video tutorial making a beautiful nature inspired gift card with a painted fabric butterfly and miscellaneous scraps from around the house.

The wave is beginning to crest, so be sure to come back tomorrow to see who's next in the wave.

The Tsunami continues day 2

Lyric has a great Turorial transforming shoes with painting.

And Alisa transforms a tank top with bright colorful painted flowers.

The wave continues to crest so stay tuned there's more to come tomorrow...

Tutorial Tsunami

Catch the wave this week as several mixed media and art quilt bloggers do a tutorial hop.

Today starts with Melly Testa making a dye printed cloth to headband

Jane LaFazio with a needle felting tutorial

and Diana Trout with a sumi smoosh mixed media tutorial

Tomorrow (Thursday) the wave will hit Lyric Kinard and Alisa Burke, friday you will have to check back and see who's next!

Sneak Peak

Here's a little detail shot of a project I have been working on. Sorry, I can't say more about it now, but hopefully you will get to see the whole thing in a few months.

Hand Eye Magazine article on divorce

A couple months ago Dawn Goldsmith owner of the blog Subversive Stitchers: Women Armed with Needles asked me to share with her my experiences working through grief with my textile art for an article she was writing for Hand Eye magazine titled "Healing with thread and fabric". She also interviewed my good friend Kathy York and fellow textile artist Katharine Brainard.

As artists, I feel like we are so lucky to have the extra therapeutic tools of our artwork to process our experiences to help us get through difficult times. I am also extremely grateful to have such a wonderful support system of loving friends; thanks for being there.

My 3 of Swords quilt featured in the article, will be part of the traveling exhibit Beneath the Surface which opens at the International Quilt Festival, Long Beach, July 23-25.

A Date with Matisse

Yesterday, Frieda Anderson, Laura Wasilowski, BJ Parady and I met with several other SAQA members from Appleton, Wisconsin and Bloomington, IL to see the Matisse exhibit at the Art Institute, here in downtown Chicago. What a fantastic exhibit, it really makes me want to paint on canvas and then maybe throw it under the needle and add a few stitches, but first I must finish another project I am working on. Sorry I can't reveal it to you right now.

After the exhibit we grabbed some lunch, chatted and discussed business, always keeping in mind we are professionals.  Frieda and I also discussed our plans for the Mexican Riviera cruise in February, Woo hoo we are gonna have fun! Then we had an informal regional SAQA meeting.