Sew Beautiful and a mini tutorial for faux stitching

The challenge at Simon Says Stamp and Show is to make a project in Wendy Vecchi’s style.  Wendy makes beautiful art, however, I don’t usually make things in that style.  So I went to her blog to get inspiration and this is what I decided to use for inspiration.  This is my inspiration piece. I hope that my canvas works for a Wendy Vecchi style project.  After looking at the inspiration piece again, I don’t think I got very close.  However, I like it anyway!!!  I didn’t want to make something that I wouldn’t have a use for later.  Anyway, I had on hand some of the the same Maya Road chipboard pieces that Wendy used on her piece.  So I started there with my creative process!  The whole thing came to me yesterday morning when I was trying to get back to sleep.  I had to get up and get a start.  When you paint and Podge, you have a lot of wasted drying time!

I painted a 5x7 canvas pink and Mod Podged crinkled up pattern pieces to the canvas.  I also did the same to a piece of GCD chipboard.  The tag is also GCD chipboard.  Then I watercolored the Tim Holtz stamp in the same colors I was using on the canvas, tore the edges and then distressed them using Old Paper Distress Ink.  I used a faux stitch technique (I’ll talk about that later.) around the outside of the canvas, glued on the watercolored image, and the scalloped chipboard.

I painted the sewing chipboard in various colors to match and topped them with a couple of coats of Sparkle Mod Podge.   The wooden spool is from my sewing box but it had hot pink thread on it.  I took all that thread off and strung on a little bit of thread to match the project.  I added lacy stuff from my sewing box to it as well.  The blue lace is seam binding and I think the other laces are for lingere. 

That’s about it.  Are you having a good weekend.  Linda, Lynn and I are having a stamping party again tomorrow.  It’s at Lynn’s house and she is having us make altered crowns.  I’m gathering up some things to make mine into a music theme.  I can’t wait to get together again.  We always have such creative fun!!!

Oh, I almost forgot about the mini tutorial.  I saw this on the Moxie Fab World blog a while back and hadn’t tried it until now.  It’s the best way ever to make faux stitching.  All you need is some acrylic paint and one of these sewing thingys.  They are used to mark darts on patterns.  This is normal acrylic paint like you would get in a bottle at the craft store.  It’s just in a different kind of tube.  Squirt out a dot of the desired paint.  I used the hot pink so it would show up.  Run the dart thingy through the paint to coat all the way around.  Test it on a scrap to make sure it is going to give the right coverage.  Then, run it on your project.  That simple!!!  Take a look at my canvas again.  It looks like I had some magic sewing machine to put stitching through the wood frame of the canvas.

Have a great Sunday!  I’ll be in the garden.  It’s going to be a nice cool day and the weeds of kinda’ gotten away from me!!!

Blessings,

Christine