Making felted pumpkins tutorial

To make felted pumpkins you will need: wool roving, yarn, pantyhose, embroidery floss, embroidery needle, and scissors.

You can also make little day of the dead skulls too, by making white felted balls adding black felt eyes and stitch nose, mouth and decorative designs like flowers and x's with colorful embroidery floss.

By the way, one of my favorite sources for wool roving is Outback Fibers.

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The tutorials continue with How to Make a Tie

Check out Alma Stollers new tute on making a tie.

and a journal tutorial with Tracie

Check out Tracie Lynn Huskamps new tutorial on adding nature to your journal.

Learn to cut plexiglass

Several months ago I scoured the internet looking for directions on how to cut plexiglass when I wanted to make some stamps and had such a hard time finding good instructions. Melly Testa has a great tutorial on cutting it with directions to make your own foam stamps.

Have you ever wanted to make beaded fringe?

Lyric Kinard has a great step by step tutorial, check it out.

Kits, kits, kits....

I keep thinking that I am almost ready for International Quilt Festival in Houston, when I realize there is so much more to do. It would be nice to have some time for art making, but right now it is all about putting kits together, and getting organized for Open Studios.

I am doing something new this year in Houston, I am participating in the Mixed Media Miscellany on Thursday, Nov. 4 from 2-4 pm. I will be demonstrating several of the techniques I used working with tea bags as a medium for collage, like I used in this piece.

There will evidently be 240 people going about the room to watch the demos during this event. I know many people have become interested in this process, so I decided to put some kits together that people can buy, since I know not everyone is as fool hardy as me and willing to stick strange stuff in their printers, lol. The kits have 2 tea bags printed with imagery, various (6) light weight decorative papers, a piece of printed dress pattern tissue, a page from an old book, a reproduction from an 1800's Montgomery Ward catalog,

4 tea stained empty tea bags, 2 pages of copyright free imagery that can be traced onto teabags and a postcard with an image of my quilt for inspiration.

This week, I also put together kits for my Make It University workshop on Saturday, Nov. 6 at 2:45 making the Origami Pop Up Book.

I brought the book sample home with me from the Long Beach show and of course, lost it and had to make another one yesterday.  Luckily, they are pretty quick to make, especially if all the pieces are cut to size and ready to go.

I hope to see you in Houston.

Great New Mixed Media Tutorial by Jane LaFazio

Jane is a master at the artst sketchbook journal, she has a wonderful new tutorial showing how she creates her lovely drawn and painted layered images using Golden absorbent ground. See Jane's tutorial.

Coming Soon!

Really, I always feel a little shy when it comes to promoting stuff like this, it's so hard to toot your own horn, but I taped a new DVD with Interweave when I was in Cleveland last month. It is due to hit the store shelves in a couple weeks. Below is the outside cover of the dvd, if you click on the photo you should be able to see all the details.

This DVD is filled with as much information and demonstrations as I could squeeze into an hour. I cover a lot of the tips, tricks and products that I have found work best for me when I make art quilts. Later in the month I will do a few blog posts to supplement some of the info on the DVD. You can pre-order Design, Paint & Stitch here.

Good Friends + Good Food = Good Times

With busy summer schedules a potluck feast with friends was long overdue. It started with lots of appetizers; kalmatas and green olives, hummus, lovely spicy sweet tangy peppadews, brie wrapped with puff pastry and chutney and another appetizer I threw together at the last minute from epicurious using the rest of the puff pastry filled with feta cheese and sundried tomatoes (I'll make those again!), italian proscuitto, guacamole, salsa and chips and a good french red wine.

We started to get too full from appetizers, but we managed to have a bowl of our next course, a lovely soup made with chick peas, potato and red peppers (sorry forgot to get a picture, too much wine, lol) then we were definitely too full for our main course of chili! Lucky for us it's one of those things that tastes even better the next day! yum, perfect for this chilly fall weather.

 

Our dessert was moist and yummy pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting, I need this recipe Megan!

My Christmas tree skirt pattern is now available on the Quilting Arts site

For those of you who bought the new Quilting Arts gifts magazine and want to make the deer Christmas tree skirt, there is a pdf of the pattern available for download on the Quilting Arts website, that you can print out and tape together.