More Fabric Bowls!

Wow have my boys been keeping me busy this summer!  So I'm trying to keep up with them plus I've started writing another blog AND we are going on vacation in three days, yikes!  This post will be short and sweet, my fabric bowls are a huge hit at the art gallery so I challenged myself to make six more before we go on vacation, I knocked out four but didn't reach my goal of six.  So here they are:

I don't work with the color purple that much but I absolutely love how this bowl turned out:

(The purple bowl sold five minutes after I walked in the door with it!)



Thanks for looking and I'll be back in three weeks!

I've started another blog!

A few years ago I wrote about my art retreat.  It was my time to get away and just create.  I have always been fascinated with the Amish culture so on these art retreats I would go to Lancaster, PA.  Over the years my art retreat has turned into a mommy's getaway and I now like to mingle with the Amish more than focus on my art.  A few weeks ago I got back from my annual mommy getaway and every time I sat down to write about it here I realized something.  I have way too much to say for just one post so I have created another blog.  I will solely focus on Amish life and my experiences among the Plain people.  It is still "under construction" but it is called My Fascination With The Amish Culture: Exploring The Plain People.

    

Another Felt and Fabric Applique Piece

Under The Sea felt and fabric applique and embroidery is finally finished, hooray!!

To remind you, this was a photo of it almost completed but I still had to finish the embroidery inside the seaweed plus add more beads and shells:

I added little red pearls to the red fabric coral (and black beads to the fishes eyes).

See if you can find five real seashells:

Give up???
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

I also added more blue beads to the two blue waves at the top; and if you look closely I used green AND blue metallic thread for the seaweed embroidery.

This is now hanging in my studio space (and is for sale) at Olde Towne Art in Portsmouth, VA.  Under The Sea measures 20" X 24"

"Fixing Her Hair"

While on Pinterest I came across this absolutely beautiful watercolor of a ballerina.  I think what caught my eye was that it wasn't a normal ballerina pose.  The artist, Inslee Haynes, named it Tutu, Aerial View and I just fell in love!  This became my inspiration piece for my first art quilt. Please visit her blog The Sketch Book so you may learn more about this talented artist.

So the first thing I needed to do was to graph the image and enlarge it.

Next I traced the pattern and cut out the pieces:

From there I found fabric for the skirt and fused it onto a piece of light green flannel.  I thought about changing the colors to pinks but then decided that greens and blues (the original colors the artist used) were more interesting.

I then stitched green-with-gold-sparkle tulle into the center to make it look more like a tutu:

From there I decided that it now needed more blue so I cut strips of shimmery blue tulle and added them around the skirt:

It still needed more "bling" so I hand stitched blue and green beads onto the blue strips:

Her body was felt applique and her hair was "doll hair" found at my local craft store:

I picked my fabrics for my boarders:

And then quilted everything except her body and her tutu:

Fixing Her Hair is now hanging (and is for sale) at Olde Towne Art in Portsmouth, VA