Painted Clothes (dragon hoodie and Pete the Cat shirt)

These are the painted clothes that I made for Kate and Andy for Christmas.   I'd read on the Gelli Arts Blog about how you can iron freezer paper to fabric to stabilize it for painting, and thought, "I must try this!" It didn't take long to come up with the perfect project. Kate has a really cute style of dragons that she draws, and she wears a hoodie almost every day at school, so I decided to put a dragon on a hoodie for her.

I already had some Golden brand textile medium to mix with my acrylic paints, and I got a blank purple hoodie from JiffyShirts.com.  I roughed out the basic shape in chalk first, but I was still a little nervous about that moment of committing paint to fabric.  Once I got started, though, it all flowed out just fine.  I like the way the dark background works as shading for the scales. 



I put the hoodie over the back of a chair so I could get at both sides. (This worked really well.) Cory helped.



My other assistant.



Completed hoodie, front and back.



I managed to do all of this without Kate seeing, so it was a complete surprise!



I also made a Pete the Cat shirt for Andy. I got a picture of the ironing of the freezer paper.  Turn shirt inside out, put freezer paper shiny-side down, apply hot iron. 



I used Derwent Inktense pencils for the whiskers. (Another recent purchase inspired by the Gelli Arts Blog--they are costing me money!) I dipped the pencil point in water before each stroke, and got a nice thick line.



"I love my red shoes!"



I got the kids to model their new clothes after they opened presents. Kate loves her hoodie!



Andy's a bit less demonstrative, but I think he likes the shirt!



I wasn't overly swamped with stressful Christmas preparations, and these didn't take too long, so it was a fun creative project and it worked out great!  I must do more!  I think next time I will try fabric paint--even with the addition of the textile medium, the acrylic is a bit stiff.

Like a Kid at Christmas

This year's tree is a Grand Fir. Isn't it cute? You may notice it's a little sparsely decorated on the bottom (aside from the paper chain that Doug and I made out of gelli prints). This was our first Christmas with a cat. He was pretty good (mostly), but we did have to keep the ornaments up higher.



Christmas morning! Kate had her usual trouble sleeping the night before, but was still up at 7:00. (I made her wait a little longer, but couldn't squeeze out more than a few minutes!) Andy was still pretty groggy.



Kate unwraps a hand-painted dragon hoodie.



Andy gets a Pete the Cat shirt.



Cory helps with the wrapping paper.



The picture cracks me up--Kate hugs her new Beanie Boo kitty, while in the background the other kitty stages a stealthy attack on the tree. (Naughty!)



Aunt Betsey got us Mastermind! This one has five spaces in the code. Oooh.



We replaced Andy's Magna-Doodle with the same model. (He's pretty hard on them.) He went to work right away drawing Mo Willem's pigeon.



This year's Christmas Pizza. (I had a little trouble with this one--will do better next time!)



Doug and Kate assemble some K'Nex.



We had Grandma Mary over later, spending the night on her way from Everett to Portland.  The kids always love having her here.  (Andy just lit up when she came in--so cute!)

 I got a new (refurbished) computer, which is fabulous (yay!), but I'm having a little trouble calibrating my monitor. (Same monitor and calibrator that I had before, but maybe Windows 7 reacts differently?) So I'm not sure how these will look.



My sister Betsey has been scanning some old photos, and found this one of Kirsten and me visiting Santa when we were little. (I'm the one on the right.) Poor Santa looks like he's had a long day!

Merry Christmas!

Being Thankful

Some of us have been sick, but we still managed to put together a little Thanksgiving Dinner. Doug roasted a chicken like last year (the one that I picked up was a seven-pounder... that's a lot of chicken!) I made my yearly apple pie (sweetened with honey), and a loaf of challa.

I would have enjoyed the meal more without my sore throat making it uncomfortable to swallow, but everything was still pretty tasty, and now I have some nice soothing chicken broth simmering on the stove.

Misionary Montage

I drew this for Dena, whose son is leaving to serve a mission in Mexico.  It's  a composite of three pictures that I found online, all done in mechanical pencil. 

Beautiful Mess

I have this drop cloth that I put over the kitchen table when I'm playing with my Gelli Plate. I've started using it to blot stamps and brayers, and got this kind of haphazard collage effect. I'm thinking maybe I should do something like this on the back of my painting shirt.

I recently helped out with an activity for the Young Women at church. One of the girls told her mom that she wants a drop cloth just like mine.

Cat-o'-Lantern

I keep seeing these really cool pumpkins that people carve, where they leave a thin layer and the light shines through.  I tried it, didn't work so well.  The carving part wasn't so bad, but when we put a candle inside it didn't really show.  Perhaps people are using stronger lights?

I ended up using one of my Speedball lino carving tips to take away the rind.  I was trying to get by without it, since I had a set before that rusted after being used on some potatoes, but I cleaned it well afterwards and we'll see if it pulls through.



Doug wore his Ravenclaw robe to classes.  Kate and Andy wore their dragon costumes (again), but we didn't get a picture because Kate wasn't ready when it was time to leave for the church Trunk-or-Treat.

We had a very rainy week, but it fortunately stopped before trick-or-treating time.  We still only had three groups stop by this year, and two of them were neighbors.  I know we had more than that last year. 

Hostas and Heucheras

The front of our house only gets sunshine in the morning, so I'm putting in a little shade garden.  (I should have gotten a "before" picture--it was so overgrown!)  I do like getting out and digging in the dirt.  Even when it's a bit rainy.  It's therapeutic. 

Everything seems to be doing well so far.  I really like the heucheras.  They come in lots of cool colors!

Gelli Plate Playing

Back in June I was at Michaels looking for a birthday present for a friend of Kate's. I flipped through a book on mixed-media and ran across a mention of the Gelli Plate--a strange and new device that I had not previously heard of. I was intrigued enough to come home and watch some videos about it, and immediately decided that I neeeeeded to get one of these. (The big one, of course). I was expecting some money from the pencil portraits that I had just finished, so I mentally earmarked it for printmaking supplies. (Because who doesn't need more art supplies, right?)



When I got my plate it was a while before I had a chance to play with it.  But the day after the kids went back to school I had a big chunk of time, so I cleared off the table and threw down the drop cloth, and Anne Marie came over and played with me.  (She's my visiting teacher.  Our visits frequently involve a craft project of one kind or another.)  We had a blast, and made a big mess, and Doug made us lunch (which we ate at our little Korean table in the living room).



Not having any idea what we were doing, it was mostly a lot of playing around with color and texture and seeing how it turned out.



I made some stamps ahead of time with craft foam, and we used those a lot.



Draw design on craft foam, cut out, glue to another sheet of foam. The small stamp is made from the negative pieces of the big one.



We got some neat effects with some ferns and weeds that I collected from the yard. If you roll some paint onto the plate, put the leaves down, and then use a scrap sheet of paper to pull off the paint around the leaves, then when you take the leaves off you've got cool leaf prints underneath. (There's also a little dragon stencil that Anne Marie cut out of Tyvek.)



The negative image looks pretty cool too.  (The blue was from an earlier print.)



We tried making some sea creature stencils, too. I'll have to do this again with multiple layers and see how it goes.

Not long after that I got Kate to do some Gelli Printing with me, when we had the day off for Labor Day. I figured she would get a kick out of it. (Mom has fun toys!)



Kate drew the dragon on the plate with a Q-tip.



I made an owl stencil that I wanted to try out, and also some texture pieces with hot glue on non-stick foil. (Non-stick... very important. Tried it with regular foil first and the pieces wouldn't peel off!)



Cat by Kate.



She painted this dragon on the plate and we pulled a print. There was a little bit of dried paint underneath that came off in the green, and gave it some interesting variation.

I tried something a little more complicated for a friend's birthday. I made some stamps and some stencils, and had it all planned out, but getting it to look right turned out to be more tricky than I had anticipated!



I think I went through about a dozen sheets of paper before I got one that I liked.



And of course all the stencils have to be re-positioned every time. (Tyvek is sturdy! And washable.)



Here's the finished product! (I painted the little words on after printing.) It was hard to get the values right in the photo, but that's pretty much what it looked like.

I have lots of other things that I want to try!   The Gelli Plate does take a little getting used to, and figuring out the quirks, but I've seen some really gorgeous things that people have done with it.  And messing around with paint is always fun!

18 years

It's our eighteenth anniversary! I grabbed our next door neighbor Steve to get a picture for us. Our first family picture in our own back yard. (I wanted to go for the evening light, but we got home a little later than I was planning.  We take what we can get!)



Apparently we can't get both kids looking at the camera at the same time.

We had a good day--Doug got to go fencing, and I spent a few hours playing with the gelli plate.  In the evening we took the kids to El Sabor and Menchie's (frozen yogurt). Kate has recently discovered that she likes burritos.  (Yay!)



We love our goofy family!