Using Hands in Kid’s Crafts

Do you remember making a hand print turkey in grade school?  Have you  ever thought of creating other things using a hand print.  I’m seeing a lot of crafts with hand prints.

 My favorite is the turkey. I liked as a child using my hand as part of the design. It made my turkey more personal.  Although then I probably thought it was just fun and silly.

If you place your hand print with the fingers upward, you can make all kinds of birds.  Another good bird for the hand print is a peacock.   The fingers are great as the feathers and the thumb can be the head with the palm of the hand as the body. 

If you place your hand print with the fingers downward, the fingers can be the legs of some four legged animals with the thumb either as the head or the tail or as in the elephant the trunk.

If you close your fingers a bit, the hand can be a fish or with some additions, a rocket.

                                                                                             

Go ahead and trace your child’s hand on paper (or yours if you want to have some childhood fun) and see what the child can come up with. 

©2017 Cheryl Fillion

Colored Pencil with Embroidery

I wrote back in March about using colored pencils on fabric (Colored Pencils on Fabric).  It is a very simple way to create a design on fabric. But you don’t have to use pencil alone.  Using a colored pencil is also a great way to enhance embroidery.

I am creating a sampler quilt with very bright colors. I decided that the alternate blocks would be embroidery.  But when I put the blocks together, the embroidery which was a simple outline embroidery (similar to Redwork) faded away.  There just was not enough of color to go with the bright pieced blocks.

Just the embroidery

I didn’t want to do the blocks over in appliqué or do another design so I got out my trusty pencils. Just like with coloring in a book, I colored within the embroidery lines.

After all the coloring is done, you then add the textile medium.  Painting the medium over the embroidery will make it stiff but with some use (like cuddling under the quilt) the embroidery will soften up.

You might be able to do the coloring first and then add the embroidery but I am not sure what the textile medium will do to the embroidery transfer lines if you use the medium on it.  It is likely to make the transfer lines permanent just as it does the coloring.

Think about using your colored pencils the next time you want a little more color to your embroidery.

©2017  Cheryl Fillion

My Creative Retreat at Home – How it went

My birthday was last week.  I didn’t travel or have a big party instead I spent the week being creative in what I called a ‘at home creative retreat’.  I had special projects planned for the week like little kits I had purchased but didn’t have time to make, progressing on a sampler quilt I had started for myself years ago and also creating a new Art doll.

I had spent the couple of weeks before my birthday week, gathering all the supplies for the projects I had planned. Part of that I turned into a challenge: let’s see how much of what I needed I could find in my supplies at home. I did pretty well with my sampler quilt and a little flamingo wall hanging. 

My art doll was a lot pickier about what she wanted. Nothing seemed to fit what I was looking for.  For some reason, my mind wanted fabric with pink and yellow. That can be a challenge when working on art projects.  You have a certain image in your mind of colors or designs and even though what you might find looks wonderful, it still doesn’t fit your image. 

I have a quilt that took far longer to complete than it should because I wanted a certain brown and just couldn’t find it.  I bought all kinds of other browns and they just didn’t satisfy my image of the quilt. If the project is important enough to you; hold out for what you want.  I did eventually find the shade of brown I wanted.

Holding out for the perfect fabric for my art doll worked.  I found just the fabric I wanted at a local quilt shop and it also added a bit more design and challenge than I had planned but in the end it turned out perfect.

I also learned to be flexible with my projects.  I had a schedule of what I wanted to do and when. That quickly went out the window the very first day.  A series of storms came through my city and I lost power.  It was so dark at 1pm in the afternoon; I had to navigate around my house with a flashlight. So I put that flashlight to good use and read a mystery.  It actually helped me relax and put me in a slower frame of mind so when the power came back, I took my time with everything and I think enjoyed the process of creating more.

Another thing I did during the week was turn off the news.  This week I lessened the amount of news I watched (I have to admit I am a news junkie.).  I would turn it on to see if the world was still rotating but then went back to some fun TV shows or listened to music.  I think less negativity helped increase my creativity.

 The first thing I completed was a necklace.  It was a kit I bought at a local craft store.  I like using kits to try out new crafts.  They usually have all the supplies you need, detailed (and sometimes pictured) instructions, and often times the tools needed as well.   The result was a nice silver sand dollar necklace.  It was so much fun I went back and got another kit to do (it helped that the kits were on sale at the store.).  After the necklace was completed, I went back and finished reading the mystery I had started (psst – the step-daughter did it.)

Silver Sand-dollar necklace

I liked having a quick project to finished, so I picked another.  It was a little 8” wall hanging of a ‘tropical scene’.  In this case I had to provide the fabric but the buttons which made up most of the design was included with the pattern and instructions. This is a design done by Flamingo Island Designs.  Unfortunately the last I heard this company has gone out of business.

Flamingo Island hanging

I took some time to work on a quilt I started a few years back. It is a sampler quilt made of bright tropical colored pieced blocks with the alternate blocks done in embroidery. These were quick and easy to do. I still have a few more to do but I am making progress.

Sand pail embroidery

Palm tree embroidery

My big challenge was my Art Doll.  Art dolls are typically not dolls children would play with but instead are just as the name indicated art.  I have done a couple with coloring with pencils on fabric and using punchneedle embroidery.  But this time I wanted to add some embellishments.  Using embellishments in any fabric craft is not a strong skill of mine.

Now I mentioned above I had in my mind fabric that was pink and yellow. What I found had the colors I wanted but also an abstract design that added a look of texture to the design.  This design came in handy with the embellishments. 

fabric close up

 I wanted to work with beads as one of the embellishments.  I thought it would be easier to add the beads after the doll was made than trying to stuff the doll with the beads in place.  So I completed the doll adding a little face that made me smile.  At first I couldn’t decide what to do with the beads.  Where do I put them?  That is where the abstract design came in.  I decided to follow the line of the design with the beads.

Front of the doll

     

    

I also bought some jewelry charms to add.  I love flamingos and since my other retreat projects were beach related, I found a little flamingo to add.  And then I found a charm that read “be YOU”.  I thought that would be a nice reminder to me whenever I looked at the doll.

Beads and flamingo charm

                              

Be YOU charm and beads

       

                             

                             

                                                             

I wasn’t sure what to do on the back.  I didn’t want to repeat the beads.  But I did have some yarn which was pink and yellow that my brother had sent me as a gift.  It is a yellow fuzzy almost chenille type yarn with a variegated yellow and pink boa type yarn wrapped around it.  Since I wanted to try something new, I decided to ‘couch’ the yarn again around some of the paisley designs of the fabric. 

‘Couching’ is an embroidery stitch where you lay a yarn or fiber on top of the fabric to be embroidered and attach that yarn with another a tiny stitch called a tie stitch.  This is used when a yarn or fiber is too thick to go through the fabric.  It allows for straight or curved lines.  

Back of doll with couched yarns

The week was great.  I finished or made progress on some long overdue projects.  And now have some wonderful reminders of my birthday. I highly recommend a creative retreat for everyone.  Even if all you can do is one day or part of a day, it is a great experience.

©2017  Cheryl Fillion 

            

Reading is Good for You…. and Your Creativity

I come from a long line of readers. My favorite memories as a child are getting books for birthday or Christmas and going to the library.  In fact right now an image popped in my head of me standing at the New Books section of the Green Bay, Wisconsin library as a teenager while at the library with my mother.

I spend much of last summer reading.  I did so much reading, that I began to wonder if something was wrong with me.  So I got on the internet and found that actually the opposite was true.  Reading is good for you.

Studies have shown, for children, reading not only increases their vocabulary but also increases their grades in school.  The more a child reads the higher their grades will be.  I have a set of books my mother bought me when I was a child called the “Best in Children’s Books”.  Each book contained an abridged novel such as Black Beauty or Alice in Wonderland.  There were usually a number of poems or short stories, some activity of some sort, a little bit of science or nature, a short biography and my favorite “Let’s visit” where some area of the world was highlighted. It included a map, local vegetation and animals, and activities of the people who lived there. I think that is where my love of other cultures came from.

For adults, research shows that reading helps delay memory decline and those who keep their mind active are less likely to suffer from dementia.  It also helps reduce stress.  When you are reading whether it is fiction or nonfiction, you are not thinking about the stresses of the day.  Your reading is taking you away, at least mentally, to a place far from where your body actually is.  If you are not thinking about stressful events, your body is not reacting to stressful events.

I also read that reading before bedtime helps relax you enough that you sleep better.  Now I recommend (and this is not based on any research) that you don’t read a very violently graphic book before bed. The violence might seep into your dreams.  But then that could just be me.

What I noticed last summer with all my reading was that I came up with more ideas for quilts and punchneedle and embroidery.  I was reading books, mostly mysteries, which took place in different areas of the country from where I lived and involved characters that had different interests than mine.  One series of mysteries took place in a tea shop.  I am not a drinker of tea but I began an interest in different teas, and teapots and tea cups and those images became part of what I created.

And whether it was the reduced stress or better sleeping that came from reading, I seemed to have more energy to create even with so much time spent on reading.  The reading also pulled me to the library again (I hadn’t been to my local library in a couple of years) and there I found all kinds of activities going on like yoga and meditation, quilt classes, coloring for adults and book clubs.  And this doesn’t even include what they have for children which would keep an child active.  Libraries these days are more than a place to check out books. 

Much of the research I read was done on fiction reading but I would think nonfiction would have the same affect (of lessening stress and dementia).  I love biographies and books about other people also pull me into another time and place.

So get yourself a book and start reading. Or go to the library and see what adventures they have for you in the pages of the books or the activities they sponsor (either for you or your kids or grandkids).  It will help with your stress, your mind, and can help with your creativity.   So go read.

©2017 Cheryl Fillion