Jasmine

This is Jasmine.  Her person is my assistant and I took this picture one day when she came to visit us at the office.

Jasmine is a beautiful girl; a white pit bull and quite large for a pit.  She's very sweet and allowed me to photograph her while she was guarding her car.  As you can see, she is very photogenic.



I've been playing around with doing a portrait of her in fabric.

I manipulated this picture in PhotoShop until it had just a few shades of grey and outlined it (I don't remember how I did it, so please don't ask).  Then I traced it onto tracing paper using a fine point Sharpy.

Then I flipped the tracing paper over and put it on a plain white sheet of paper (actually the backside of the original print).  I taped it down and taped a piece of freezer paper on top and traced it.  Then I did another piece of freezer paper so that I would have two to cut out pieces from -- one for big pieces and one for the little bits that sit on top of the big pieces.

This is as far as I've gotten.  Tomorrow is House Cleaning Day at Chez Karen, so I don't know if I'll be able to post again until next week.

Who knows what evil lurks in those dust bunnies and piles of junk...

More About Those !#@%$#&*!! ATCs

I finished some ATCs using the "fabric" I was whining about in the previous post.  I mounted some smaller squares on blue card stock (because it's "pond-like") and added little frogs.  I also gave them even more texture by running a line of glue on them and sprinkling tiny beads onto the glue.  A fun project except for the tiny beads that got all over my cutting mat.

I tried punching out dragonfly shapes from the "fabric," but it didn't work at all and plugged up my punch.  I spent half an hour trying to pick out the bits.  I won't try that again.

Working on ATCs

I've been working on some ATCs (artist trading cards) to trade at Festival in Chicago and for an online swap I'm thinking of participating in.

I had some problems with the ones on the left.  I layered puff paint over some tulle on fabric on cardstock.  Then I put a couple of layers of paint over the whole thing.  Trouble came when I had a bright idea:  instead of cutting the cards with scissors, I decided to take it to work and use the paper cutter.  Easy - right?  Nice, even, straight 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inch cards.  Ha!  In my defense, I rarely use the paper cutter.  It's not my job.  So when it came time to measure, I cut one of the strips at 2 inches instead of 2 1/2.  So I lost three potential cards.  Now I have to think of this as an opportunity to use smaller pieces somehow.  More later...

Rich...

This week, the Creative Cue is "rich."  I thought of a dragon guarding his treasure.  He was smiling, but I had to do some erasing, and he must not have liked it.

The Last Snow Dye (Maybe...)

Yesterday morning, I woke up to this:

Which led to this:

Which led to these:

Chocolate brown, grape, golden yellow on scrunched cotton -- this is the only one with the crystalline patterns from the snow.  The rest have some nice colors that separated out, but not much of the snow effects.  The snow was pretty slushy and melted pretty quickly.  I probably could have piled more on top and gotten better results -- Oh well, next time (year?).

Scarlet and sapphire with a little grape

These two were both pleated, then I used sapphire, golden, and lemon yellow.

Scarlet, golden and lemon yellow on pleated fabric with snow on top.  It's much more orange than I thought it would be.

A little bit of snow was forecast and I toyed with the notion of prepping some fabric and dyes Friday night.  But I was afraid I would jinx any snowfall by preparing for it, so I didn't.  You can tell that Friday nights are pretty wild up here in North Sodom and Gomorrah, if soaking fabric and mixing dyes are on the program (why d'ya think they call it Wisconsin?).

Oh -- and I finally saw one of these!  Sorry the picture's a little fuzzy -- my camera doesn't really do far away and he (she?) took off when I got close to the tree.  So I guess spring is finally here.

Creative Cue: Tip

It snowed this morning and I took these pictures of tulips coming up through the snow.  I didn't plant these; they came with the house.

TAST Week 2 (Still a Bit Late)

TAST 2010 Week 2 is the Knotted Loop stitch (find it here).  In the previous post (whew -- two in one night!), I blogged about the CQ 4x4s and TAST.

This stitch is worked from right to left -- you can see in the top photo that it's a little rugged at first, but then it evens out.  This would be a good stitch for a caterpillar, or maybe a mustache.  Or a leaf -- see the shape in the second photo.  I like it a lot in the variegated thread.

I'm not sure I did it right because there appears to be no knot, but...I like this stitch!