Wednesday, December 28, 2016

1 Year of Stitches

The blog Brown Paper Bag is sponsoring a year-long embroidery project called 1 Year of Stitches. The goal is to fill a hoop entirely with stitching (any color, any design, any theme) by working on it a little bit every single day for an entire year. You can read the details here.

I decided to play too, and I'm ready to start on January 1.This is a 12" hoop, and the fabric is plain bleached muslin cotton. I will use regular embroidery floss, though I might add beads here and there. I have no idea what I'll do with the piece when it's done, but in this case the *doing* is the point.



Though I will free-form-make-it-up-as-I-go, I also choose a loose design scheme: a ROYGBIV color wheel, which each wedge predominantly shades of that color, hopefully fading and transforming into the next color. I drew the lines to give me a notion of the wedge size, and I wrote the color names on the fabric just to remind myself what goes where. All of the ink will be covered by stitching.

You can use any size hoop, any background fabric, any floss, any color, any theme, any stitches.

I think it's going to be great fun, and I will, of course, update pics. I don't anticipate working on it every single day, since I'm kind of a *burst* crafter. But however it happens, it'll be an adventure.

I don't do Twitter, but I'll post on Instagram and Facebook. They ask for posts to be tagged thusly:  #1yearofstitches; @1yearofstitches; #bpbstitches so everyone can watch everyone's progress!

I hope you will play along too!


Thursday, October 13, 2016

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Sunday, October 2, 2016

More Folk Art Santas

I would be embarrassed about how much I am enjoying coloring my own drawings, but I'm not...

You can buy the book here.








Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Folk Art Santas!

Last October, I looked in stores for color-your-own Christmas cards, and could not find any. So I decided to draw my own. And then I kept drawing. And then I realized I had enough drawings for a whole book. This is the result:


 Folk Art Santas is now available from Amazon! Astute observers with long memories might notice that the style is very similar to the embroidery fabrics I designed through Spoonflower. All of them were inspired by wood carvings I did back in the '90s.



The book has 33 coloring pages, including: 20 Card Fronts (you can either color the pages and then cut and glue them to card stock, or you can copy the designs directly on cardstock. No cardstock is included in the book), 6 Bookmarks, 8 Coloring Pages (which can be used to wrap small gifts), 4 Gift Bags, 2 Small Gift Cards, 8 Gift Tags, and 1 Santa Paper Doll with 12 outfits!


Here's a sneak peek:






I've already started coloring my copy.




Both pages were colored with Prismacolor Markers and a white gel pen.