Thursday, December 31, 2009

craft night: freezer paper prints

Recently I have been hosting a (nearly) weekly craft night. It is one of the most rewarding things I do. Not only am I spending time with some of my dearest friends, but I'm also getting to be productive with all that creative energy.

Last night we made prints on canvas out of freezer paper. It's kind of similar to screen printing, but much more labor intensive if you want to do more than one.

Here's how the magic happens:

Draw your design with pencil on the non-shiny side of the paper. Then cut it out with an Xacto blade. You can do floating shapes inside of a cut-out but know that you'll have to manually position it on your fabric, and it is difficult to keep it in place.
Next, iron it shiny-side down onto your fabric until it's mostly stuck. Use a very hot iron.
Use a sponge brush or paint brush to dab your paint directly onto the fabric. Be sure not to spread the paint using strokes. Paint could be pushed under the stencil this way. It's not pretty, trust me.
Gently peel your freezer paper stencil from the fabric. You really should wait for it to dry before removing. That being said, we were all super impatient, and pulled it off immediately after painting it. You just need to be careful that your wet stencil doesn't fall onto your print.
...and ta-da! This is my finished tote bag.
Alissa's beautiful honeycomb print.
Maria's canvas panel to later be stitched to her tote bag.

happy new year (holiday recap)

We're finally done with family Christmas gatherings! After attending our fifth party on tuesday night, we wrapped up a five day long holiday extravaganza. Here's a brief recap on the last day of 2009.

Happy New Year, Everyone! Be safe tonight.
My fancy new boots that my husband picked out all on his own!
I got 50 SHARPIE MARKERS, a button maker, and many other things that made me immensely happy. I am a lucky girl.
It's true, kids really do make Christmas special. Here are some cousins who needed no help getting into the holiday spirit (even if it was 5 days after Christmas).

Monday, December 28, 2009

rollerderby

I missed this pic in my random update somehow. It's a photo of Mrs. Tessa right after her first roller derby scrimmage. Even though her team the Gingerbread Girls, lost to the Elves I think she looked pretty darn cute doing it.

Go, Tessa!


bananaface!

This Christmas has been absolutely bananaface! I've been crafting and wrapping and shopping and baking (or watching Rodger bake), and gifting since December 1st. Somehow I even managed to squeeze in my job and an occasional work out. Unfortunately, the one thing that has fallen to the wayside (other than my laundry pile), is this blog. I promise I will do better.

Here is a very brief overview of what has been going on over the past month.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

labels!

If Poppytalk's blog were a page in a book, it would be all ear-marked and about to fall out because of how often I visit it. They never cease to inspire me. Today I came across these cute, free, downloadable labels that they were kind enough to offer us all:
http://poppytalk.blogspot.com/2009/02/free-downloadable-labels-from-us.html

I plan on using them as gift labels for Christmas this year. I hope they're okay with me opening the .pdf up in Illustrator and making them my own. I customized the colors to match the scheme we're going with for our tree and gift wrap this year. Then I added in a "to/from" line with our names in it. This way the recipient's name is the only thing you have to write in. This is important to me, as I have hopelessly sloppy penmanship.

Here's how mine turned out:
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