5 days till the market

Nothing like an approaching deadline to get you moving. My husband is away and my little man is feeling better, which means I am well rested and I have my evening to create. Woohoo.

Today in nap time I did some practice printing (meaning none of the prints worked out), then cut this stencil after readying about a boy tee competition over at I Am Momma. This evening I set up my printing area with scraps or jersey fabric and a couple of items from the thrift store (I like using second hand tees as it's cost effective and I'm more adventurous).

For the competition I wanted to do something more interesting so I cut out a little fish that I had printed the same image on... I liked the idea, not sure if it worked.. then tried sewing the whole print on, not sure which one I will enter.


The top 2 I will definitely keep for Rio, the bottom one will go to the market.

random scraps to tote inspiration

When I find myself with time to spare, do I hit the exercise bike? clean? nope, straight to the sewing room (table in the corner of our bedroom) it is. The Griz Days market is on the 5th of March and a couple of girlfriends and I are putting together a table. I even managed to find a friend who will watch Rio for 2hrs so I can man the table for a while. woohoo!

I am doing a bit of a random collection, kids drawstring toy bags, bibs, kids tees and skirts. Most I have made but the tees I bought and printed. I am going to be plugging away till then on items for the market.

However last night I just need to get crafty so I started sewing some scraps together. I thought when I reach a square that I could cut it up and use it for small items that needed a bit of colour. Then a lunch tote or craft bag seemed to be the goal, so I started sewing and this is where the project ended up. I like it.. and think it may go in the stash until a certain persons birthday pops up then I will post it off. Oh how happy I am to be so organised .

making for the market

The Griz days market is only 2 weeks away!! A couple of friends and I are going to do a stall, which is fantastic. It means all the one off small projects will get there day in the sun, also I get to find more uses for the some of the prints I did at the course. The whistling bird I did a while ago, when I first made childrens treasure bags, the 2 others have a different strap that can be worn over the shoulder..

I will have to post a pic of our table all decked out with our goodies.. I just have to find a way to deal with my little man (who is almost 17 months and way to busy to just hang out).

Nap Time Crafts

My little man's head had barely even the pillow and I was setting up my printing stuff. I had seen an image of a deer with a lot of detail that I really liked so I just simplified it, so I could turn it into a stencil. I am really happy with the final image.

To do such a small print I used a small embroidery hoop with a sheer curtain as the mesh, it was so easy to do that I had put together the screen, cut the stencil and printed and cleaned up all while my little man was sleeping. can't beat that.


Perfect timing, I can hear him stirring now.

mug rugs

Now that I have all of these fun prints from my course, I have to try to use them in my future projects. So I put the simple but sweet birds into Mug Rugs that I am doing for a swap through The Quilting Gallery. I really like these, and hope that their new owner in the United Kingdom enjoys them.

4 days away!!

So my friend Athena and I just got away, kid free for four days!! It was fantastic, we did a 2 and a half day course which was inspiring. Silk screen printing at ACAD in Calgary we built a screen then printed using a stencils and a screen with photo emulsion. I have worked with stencils before and then hand painted them, however using a screen allows you to reuse the stencil and the coating of paint is nice and even.
The instructor was great she really opened my eyes to the possibilities of stencils. I wasn't happy with the quality of photo emulsion image that I produced, my screen was the first screen so the timing with the ultraviolet light was a little off, as a result it was under exposed and started to wash off the screen. Stencils are more what I am interested in and are super easy to clean up after when you are working in a small space at home.

Of course we couldn't go to the Big Smoke and not do some shopping, I was happy to come home with a new dress, belt, shirt (which I printed on) and shoes, then something for my fellas, and finally Ikea for the house and a fun mirror for Rio with doors so he can play peeka boo with himself, so cute.

Here are some of the my favorite prints:
The Blue t-shirt is done with 1 stencil and blobs of 2 colours, pulling the squeegee down the screen makes this effect. The green t-shirt is actually 2 different stencils. This stencil was super quick, these weren't the best prints as one of the cars looks stripy, this was caused by putting newspaper over the print so I could print another one beside it before it had dried. The paint that had touched the newspaper dried differently from the paint that didn't, interesting effect. I didn't want to waste them so turned them into bean filled bookends.