THANK YOU!

You know who you are. All of you who have purchased Stitch Alchemy and all of you who have posted projects, reviews and comments or written to me directly. The book is ranked #1 in sewing, #1 in papercrafts and #1 in needlework on Amazon. Everyone over to my house for an icecream party!!!!! You deserve it. My heartfelt thanks for the wonderful reception. I am so honored.

Stitched Acrylic Paintings

My second round of acrylic paintings. I moved from stretched canvas to watercolor paper, which is less intimidating! When they were dry I stitched around the lines. Just for fun. I haven't really done much painting for painting's sake, so it makes a nice break.

Stitchpaper Express

I've been working with the Stitch Alchemy book study group on Mixed Media Art Friends and we're working on week 2,3,4, which is coloring our original paper/cloth or stitchpaper with inks, paints, stains and glazes. I've been so impressed with all the creativity and beautiful work everyone is doing. Here are my sheets of colored stitchpaper, ready for the next stage.

The Family That Stencils Together...

I was so impressed with these stencils my 16 year-old made--and the coolest part is that she stenciled me on her wall across from her bed. Isn't that sweet? One is me and the other is her with her sister. She made the stencils out of cardstock and the images are spray painted on black cardstock. She's one talented teen :)

The Best Part--Serendipity!

I've been making stitchpaper like mad and will be posting week 2 results for the book study. Does it sound crazy to be in a book study for the book you wrote? It's a great motivation for me to make art! Anyway, here's what's so fun about being creative. This is a sampling of the paper towels and newspapers under my work. I've ironed them out and they're ready for some other project. I especially like to wrap gifts in the inked paper towels and tie them up with lovely fibers. Both kinds of serendipity paper look nice wrapped around paper beads. Just wait til we start stamping and such!

Stitch Alchemy Book Study and a free gift!

I'm so excited that uber-artist Belinda Spiwak (aka crazyartgirl and alteredbelly) is running a book study on Stitch Alchemy, that I've decided to play along at her generous invitation. There is already a LOT of alchemy sizzling over on Mixed Media Art Friends. The group begins this week and they're creating stitchpaper like crazy. You can read Belinda's instructions or find mine on pages 14-18 of the book.

Here is the schedule for playing along:
Week of Oct. 4: Create basic fabric/paper (stitchpaper) p. 14-18
Week of Oct. 11: Inviting Juiciness p. 24-27
Week of Oct. 18 and 25: Coloring with Paints and Glazes p. 29-34
Week of Nov. 1: Metallics p. 35-38
Week of Nov. 8: Chalks and Markers p. 39, Reducing and Removing Color p. 40-41
Week of Nov. 15: Casting Chance p. 42-45
Week of Nov. 22: Texturizing p. 4-49, Masks and Resists p. 50-51
Week of Thanksgiving: art school is out for the holiday!
Week of Dec. 6: Printmaking Techniques p. 52-53
Week of Dec. 13: Effects p. 54-57
Week of Dec. 20: Crafted Whimsy p. 58-62, Journaling p. 63-64, Baubles etc. p. 64-65

I'm going to offer a gift to anyone who'd like to participate in this study. If you join the group and "add" yourself to the book study (just let the group know you're in), then post at least one picture of some stitchpaper/cloth-paper you've made or a technique you've tried from the book to the shared files, I'll mail you a little something from my studio. The enthusiasm is contagious. MMART Friends is a big Yahoo group who do all kinds of mixed media, so only those interested will be taking part in the Stitch Alchemy book study.

You can also sign up for a swap--we're trading good fortune birds, love dolls and some 6" squares of stitchpaper so far. Hosts/hostesses are welcome!

There's plenty of time to get involved. I've got some plain stitchpaper brewing up today and we'll be decorating it through the rest of the year, then trading projects at the first of the new year.

To get your giftie from me...join up and as soon as you've posted a pic of your work to the shared files, email me with your name and address at kellininaperkins on gmail. I'll be working along with the schedule and will mail out gifts as I finish them.

Sketch to GIMP

If you haven't heard me mention it before, I really love the FREE software called GIMP, which stands for GNU image manipulation program. It's a delightful FREE program with most of the bells and whistles you'll find in photoshop. There is so much to it that I only know how to use a handful of tools. I've been playing with scans of sketches and here's tonight's result. The black and white was the original paper drawing with a marker. I scanned it and saved it as a jpg, then did some fills and spraypaint with GIMP. Easy as pie! Mmmm....in the mood to draw some pie now.

Oops I Blurbed

As you can tell, I've been playing with web tools lately. There is so much out there for customizing everything from fabrics to fonts. My latest toy is Blurb and I've apparently become a "blurbarian" without much effort. Okay, maybe a day or two's work pulling together photos. I decided that it would be nice to have a compendium of the last few years' worth of artwork at a glance, so I knocked together a 194 page book filled with art. This represents at least my favorite, if certainly not all my work. So on rainy days I can be sure that I have, in fact, been doing something with my time besides biting my nails. Now, of course, I want to create some more (much smaller) original books. There is a link to the book on the right hand side of the blog--it's titled "art. stitch. life." This is just a photo book of art--no text. The software is easy to use and I'd recommend this site if you want to put something special together.

Wordle Me a Riddle

Made this neat little ditty on wordle . It's a cloud, based on the first page of el bloggo. Make love dolls and lots of kitty holding and fabric fusion!

Art Skins

I found out that you can make skins for your high tech toys, so I immediately ordered one for my phone. This is a piece of art that I uploaded to Snapfish and manipulated to get it where I wanted it on the phone. You can also make them for your pc, so that may be next. Now my phone is also my art!

Paper Cloth Names and Winner

Wow--what a lot of fabulous ideas! I love many of them and others make me laugh with prior associations. Some of them I can't pronounce! Here's the final list: clothinpaper, material medium, altered paper, mache, fusion material, colabric, paperic, papyric, papterial, fiber too, papclo, clopap, clotper, fiber-cloth, faber, faper, pafab, plypaper, kelliabric, celluabric, papyrmus, fabaper, sewpaper, papersew, artfabric, stitchpaper, papertex, fabricpaper, paperfabric, caliper, fabricaper, quilting paper, sewable paper, fusion fabric, othpa, re-cloth, cloper, woper, fiper, paber, capag, capgu, woven paper, structural paper, foundation paper, fabpaper, paperized fabric, paperized plypaper. Whew! I'm leaning HEAVILY towards stitchpaper for probably obvious reasons. I love the word stitch. But I also like fusion material, material medium, quilting and sewable paper and I love paperized fabric. I'm gonna still mull it over for a bit, but the winner of the DVD is vintage rock chick Gill! She has an awesome blog so check it out (see her link in the comments).

I've been working on some paper-cloth projects like this journal purse and enjoying the summer!

Peace, Bake, Sew Stuffies

I finished my personal stuffies printed at Spoonflower. Each was cut out, embroidered, beaded and stuffed. We have Peace Kitty (holding a birdie) and Peace Birdie (holding a kitty); Bake Birdie and Bake Kitty holding cupcakes; and Sew Birdie and Sew Kitty holding enormous spools of thread. I love doll forms but like for them to stand up, so I ended up making my own stands as I have done in the past. These were super simple. I created a small pocket on the back of the doll and stitched it on. The stands are simple shapes from the wood aisle at Hobby Lobby...a round beveled base, some wooden spools and dowels that fit into the spools. The spools are glued to the base and the dowels cut to 6" and inserted into the spools with glue. I used E6000 because I don't like to clamp and wait for regular wood glue. For a couple of bucks you can have personalized doll stands easy as pie. Paint them any color you'd like!

Our EMT Girl

Things were pretty exciting around here last week when my 18 year old became a certified EMT (Emergency Medical Technician)! She was nail-biting over the nationals. We helped her study and it was an impressive amount of information from every working system in the body to drug interractions, plus legal issues and just generally what to do in every emergency situation you've heard of and tons you never imagined. She's off to paramedic school next month. We are very proud of her!

Holiday Gifts 2009

The Quilting Arts Holiday Gifts Issue is available for pre-order now. I made these delicious no-cal cookie pins for all you sugar addicts out there. We might as well wear our passions on our chests. Cookies. Yum! This ish looks great--check out the link. I WILL be making Melanie Testa's cool name badge holders, as I am always going to conferences and wearing those geeky clear plastic monstrosities. Can't wait to see what else is in there!

What's In a Name Giveaway

In case you missed it (and if you don't subscribe to Cloth Paper Scissors online Embellishments newsletter, you missed it), I did a brief interview about this thing we refer to as paper-cloth or cloth-paper. It's both, really, so what to call it? We discarded Maper (material-paper) and Ploth (paper cloth) as too clunky. I'd love to come up with a great term that describes it, so I'm eliciting suggestions here.

Because I need to celebrate so many things...Stitch Alchemy has been hovering around the #1 spot in quilting, sewing and papercrafts on Amazon; this is my 500th blog post and our awesome Mustang Bullitt just won a trophy (unrelated but I'm still celebratin'), I want to give something away if you'll post your naming ideas in the comments.

I'll pick a random name as the giveaway winner on August 15 and mail them a copy of the Quilting Arts Workshop: Stitch Imagery DVD. This is a one hour dvd that will show you how to turn a photo into fabric art. If you already have that, we'll work out a deal for something else! Because I can't for the life of me figure out how to request your email address in my comment box, consider following me on twitter. I'll announce the winner here and there.

The first suggestions come from Debra A: CLOTHINPAPER or MATERIAL MEDIUM or ALTERED PAPER. All very compelling. What ya got for me?

Stitch Imagery Charm Bracelet

This project was created for Embellishments, the great newsletter from Cloth Paper Scissors. Here is a link to the directions, and be sure to sign up for the newsletter here to get great projects in your email.

Let the Drum Rolls Roll!

With glee, I accepted this package from the postman. Lovely Rebecca from Interweave wrapped it in butterflies and sent it to me overnight. This was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done, and it's a joy to see the final product sitting here on my studio table. Now I get to read the dedications to all the people I love and let them know just how much their support has meant to me. May all of your dreams come true, as mine have!

To celebrate this occasion, I'm going to have some giveaways...I have some artwork, some supplies and some extra copies of my favorite magazine Cloth Paper Scissors that I'd like to move out into the creative community. Check back soon.

Just Sketchin'

I've been enjoying taking my sketchpad with me around town. I often find myself waiting....waiting for daughter to be released from school, waiting for the doctor, waiting for lunch...just waiting. So I have been sketching scenes out of magazines. You may recognize some of these from the magazines you read! I find that this is a good way to make the big picture two-dimensional. Let the photo do it for you. Begin by reproducing the basic outlines, then embellish and go off in directions of your own. I use a Pitt artists pen and prefer glossy, coated paper for pen and ink. I'm learning to be brave and just let the lines flow without penciling them in first. These are all just spontaneous drawings. I edit and correct by going over lines again with the pen. Have confidence in your lines, then clean up afterwards.

Summer Photos

Just a few summer views around home. The first treat from the garden, the shadow of a fern in the woods and a reading nymph.

Poker Face

Jo Ann Bryan showed me her poker face with this great stitched image she made after watching Stitch Imagery workshop. She made this textile piece as a gift for her friend. I love the vivid colors and the fun subject. I'm a big Texas Hold'em player myself. Who wouldn't love to have that big stack of chips? Great work!