Is It Valentine’s Day Yet?

I finished the stitching on my two Valentine’s Day cards. Now I just have to fuse them down to the card stock and write something “sweet” inside.

 I think I’m going to use this one, although with the stitching, I like them both.

Here’s an extra one. Perhaps I can just use this one for next Valentine’s Day.

Here’s my next stitching project. I made the yellow felt piece yesterday and fused the blue cut piece down to it this morning. Now I need to stitch it down. I will trim the outside edge once I stitch the middle section down. The right side edge is really thin and I thought it would be better to stitch and make it secure before I cut around the edge.

Be Mine?

It’s getting close to Valentine’s Day and I usually make a card for my sweetie. He would be disappointed if I bought him one now. So I thought I would make a shadow applique to put on the card.

 This was my original design. I already had this fabric with fusible on the back. So I just cut it out, found a background and fused it down.

 I ended up cutting the applique pieces with a craft knife so I had two appliques. I think I like this one better.

I then covered them with silk organza. Now to stitch them down and attach them to a card. I’ll do the stitching this week and I’ll show you the result soon.

Final Layer of Painting

I did a final layer on my leaf painting. I’m sure I could add more but I think it’s enough at this point. I will be doing another  one anyway and since this is just going into my studio journal, I decided to stop.

 Here’s the whole spread. I really enjoyed painting this because if you “mess up”, you can always paint over it on the next layer.

 Here’s a little closer view.

And the other page a little closer. You can find the directions for this on Create Mixed Media.

Stamp Carving Party

Today I met with my local group and we carved stamps. We had a great time and the stamps turned out great.  I also put another layer on my leaf painting and fused the fabric down on my stitched cards.

 Here are the cards all finished up. I just took fusible webbing and fused the fabric to the paper card.

 Here’s another layer finished on the leaf painting. I think I will add a few more layers yet. This is what we’re going to do for our next monthly meeting. I think I’ll do the next one on a canvas.

 This afternoon our group met and carved stamps. This is Louise’s stamp based on frost patterns. Isn’t it cool?

 Here are some of Jan’s designs.

 And another of Jan’s designs.

 Here is one of my stamps partially carved out.

 These are more of my stamps. You will see these in the future as I have plans to make some wall hangings with these.

 Here are a couple of stamps that Carole carved.

 These are Bunny’s prints of ginkgo leaves.

 And Bunny carving her take of the frost design.

 Here’s Bunny’s butterfly stamp.

 This is one of Carole’s prints.

 Here’s Bunny’s leaf stamp.

 And prints of her butterfly stamp. She is going to work further into these with pen or colored pencil.

 Here is Louise inking up her stamp. I forgot to get a photo of her stamped image. We had a great time.

Stitched Cards and a Diseased Lion

I finished stitching the last two cards that I laid out over the weekend. I also did another drawing into an “ink blot”. I’m not as pleased with this one as I was with Stanley the Snail. Particularly what I dislike is the black tongue, he looks diseased.

 Here’s one of the cards I stitched today. It was originally supposed to be with the three small blue stripes towards the top but I liked this orientation better.

 You can barely see the stitching on this one in the photo. There is blue stem stitch on the blue fabric.

 Here you  can see the stitching a bit better.

So here is the page before I started drawing the lion. Can you see his nose and eyes?

Here he is after I drew in the details. The black tongue just looks silly. Oh well, these are supposed to be silly sketches and so here is my diseased lion.

I’m getting the stitches out of my finger today. I think I might have damaged some nerve endings as my finger tip is a bit tingly and numb feeling. Hopefully, that will return to normal.