Tattered Table Cloth Skirt

My last day before I start school again. Sigh... I was having so much fun in my sewing room. I have been working on a new skirt for my Etsy site. It is made from an old tablecloth I had in my hope chest. It had a hole in the middle and I decided to just tear it open all the way. I decided to fold the torn part over to make a little apron and do a little painting and applique. I think it looks pretty nice. I have been making most skirts wrap around but I decided to do this one with an elastic waist.

So here it is. I had the most fun! I used a fabric dye to do some painting and an old cotton table cloth for the skirt.  I figure it will need to be washed in cold water and no dryer from now on.

Here is the finished skirt.

Here is a close up.

I should have it on Etsy soon.

Another Finished Skirt

Ahhh, snowy days, excellent music and my sewing machine. Good times. I did have to change from my Huskylock to my mother's old trusty Singer. My Huskylock isn't playing well with the t-shirt fabric. I"m going to have to take it down for a look see by the magic sewing machine guy in town.
However, I did finish a third skirt. I love the uneven hemline. It is a wrap-around so depending on how you put it on, it will change a bit.

Back to the sewing room!

Bonding with my serger again

I haven't been visiting my serger lately and it was feeling pretty lonely and a bit cranky. But I managed to make this cool wrap around skirt using some upcycled t-shirts I got at the second hand store. I think this turned out pretty good and thankfully have lots more t-shirts to experiment with. This will be on my Etsy site pretty soon. Just have to decide if I want to finish off the hem or leave it plain.

Until next time!

My Latest Project

I have been busy doing school work for so long and now have a wonderful 3 week break. My sewing machine has been making sad whining sounds so I need to keep it company for a while. I miss my sewing machine big time.
Here is my latest project.

Here is a some postcard art.... work in progress.

Well, back to work. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

And the winner is....

Good Morning everyone. Thank you for checking back today. I have a winner for my giveaway of a set of 4 quilt cards!

The winner is........

Connie  

Yea Connie!

Here is what she wins.

Congratulations Connie. Hope to hear from you soon so I can get these in the mail to you. Just click on "view my complete profile" for my email link.

Thank you everyone for visiting my blog.

Hello EQ7 Blog Hoppers!! Welcome.

Welcome to my blog! This is my offering to SewCalGal's blog hop. I hope to teach you a new way to use EQ7!
So many quilts, so little time. How often we feel this way. I can't tell you how much time I spend on EQ7 just creating away knowing I won't have the time to make even half of these quilts. Well one day I was fooling around with a photograph of my cat. Quilts and cats can be in the same subject! So I took this picture. I know..... he is so photogenic.

Stay with me now.. this might get a little complicated. But if I can do it. You can! I opened it in Picasa and "boosted" the color. If you double click on your picture it takes you to an area where you can do fun things with your pictures. OK, so I "boosted" the color, saved it and exported it to a file on my computer. Btw I save it at 150 dpi. I then open it in Photoshop. There are really cool "filters" you can apply to your photos. I went through a few and found "cut out". I applied it to this picture and this is what it did.

Pretty cool huh. So I thought if I could do this to photos, what about quilt designs from EQ7.
Check this out! Here is one quilt design I did.

Now after I altered it in Photoshop using the  "fresco" filter effect.

What do you think? Looks like a piece of art now.  Pretty cool I say. You can totally do this with other photo altering software. But I find I like Photoshop the best. Don't have Photoshop? You can actually access it online.(in the cloud) It is a bit costly unless you are a student. It is around $75.00 for one month. But if you get all your work ready, you can do quite a bit in a month. Check it out here... Adobe Creative Cloud. There even seems to be a 30 day free trial. I haven't checked it out so if there are any catches, I don't know. But check it out.
You can just alter it in Picasa. Check out this one. Go from this....

To this...I used the Posterize effect.

So even if you don't have Photoshop, you can still make your designs look like cool artwork. Of course if you are a Photoshop guru you could figure out how to do everything in Photoshop. But I like the "boost" feature in Picasa and then transfer over to Photoshop for the rest.

Anyway, what am I doing with all these cool pieces of art? I am printing note cards and selling them on Etsy.
You can check them all out at curiousorangecat.etsy.com. However.... just for this wonderful blog hop I am offering a giveaway to one lucky person of a set of 4 of my new note cards. Just go to my  Curious Orange Cat Etsy site and then come back here and comment on any product I sell there. Tell me which one you love, hate, wish you had..  ( you don't have to buy anything. I just want you to look). I'll do the drawing and announce the winner here on my blog on October 5. Now get back to designing those quilts! Don't forget to come back here on October 5 to see if you won!

And visit Sewcalgal for the rest of the participants in the Blog Hop. Just click on the link here SewCalGal to see who's blog is next! Thank you so much for visiting!

Wash Everything She Says....

In reading my Fusing Fun book from Laura Wasilowski the other day, Laura says to wash all your fabrics first so the fusible web would stick better. I don't want tooo..... (said in a whiny voice.. feet stamping).  I guess she says this for a reason.  Fine, so I'll do it! Well Ok, I did have a few things that didn't want to stick very well. So guess what I did all day yesterday!

Yeah, it was wash day. This is only half the pile. The other half is by the ironing board. But one nice thing about spending a day ironing is that you fall in love with your fabrics all over again.

This gem was folded up and I haven't really looked at it in quite a while. I found all kinds of great combinations of colors ranging from bright green to dark purple. I'll be using this for sure!

I'm still working on it today. But along with all the ironing I did finish one of my quilts.

This was my first attempt at the "Laura Wasilowski" style. I still need to work on it a bit. Next time I'll leave more room around the edges so my main picture doesn't get covered up by the border. I'm thinking about donating this to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative. You can click my link and check it out. You can support them by either putting in a bid for a quilt or buying one outright. All money goes to Alzheimer's research.
Later..... the iron is calling. Sigh....