The link is:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/12-Tags-Of-Christmas-2011/169976003099169

Hope to see you there

Trish

As I type I have just finished moving all my tumblr blog posts over to the new wordpress blog, I preserved the same date and time stamps, art images and my blurbs and mumblings in the format they were originally posted.

When I first started dipping my toes back into the creative waters in April this year, Tumblr suited my needs as I needed a place where I could upload my dabblings with the minimum amount of fuss.

The time has come for me to move onto a proper blogging platform again, wordpress has always been my favourite blogging software so I registered the ‘lost muse journals’ yesterday and got to work.

Thanks for following me so far.

http://trishbee.tumblr.com/

You can also find me on facebook here:

http://www.facebook.com/trishbeeuk

http://networkedblogs.com/blog/lost_muse_journals/

The link to visit it is below:

http://trishbee.tumblr.com/

Ive been playing with some of the fabric backgrounds I made yesterday, Ive stamped and stencilled on some of them using fabric paints. I used Crafters Workshop stencils which are a dream to use! I must buy more!!

For those of you who havent used these fab templates, you really must! You can see the entire range along with some ideas for using them on their website below:

http://www.thecraftersworkshop.com/

You can see what I did below, just click on the links to see bigger pixs:

You can view the short teaser video I saw on Colouricious’s Youtube Channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Colouricious#p/u/7/z0r8QCIuHaM

Being a bit of a background junkie these paints appealled to me so I immediately wanted some!

The paints I used are by a UK company called Colourcraft who make a vast range of inks, paints and dyes for textiles and papercrafts.

You can read more about the company’s range of transfer inks here:

http://www.colourcraftltd.com/default_p.asp?RangeID=145#

and

http://www.thetextiledirectory.com/shopping/listingresult/Shopping-for-Textile-Art-+-Craft-Supplies/Art-+-Multimedia-Materials/Colourcraft-Colours-+-Adhesives-Ltd/

I got my transfer paints from Rainbow Silks, they have a set of 12 paints for only £12.25, which is very good value I think. They are actually cheaper on the Colourcraft website but they dont have an online shopping cart so I couldnt check out my order without using the phone and I cant hear on the phone (I’m deaf) so that was out of the question! So I had to get mine from Rainbow Silks, the url for the paints I bought is:

http://www.rainbowsilks.co.uk/ProductDetails.cfm?SubCatId=62&Code=COLFTP28SET

Today was the first time I’d sat down and played with the paints and I was really impressed!

The paints themselves are nice and gooey, kinda like acrylic paints in consitency, when I first used them I was a bit dissapointed by the colours in the pots, they were supposed to be BRIGHT and they sure didnt look bright. The golden yellow looked more like yukky light brown, so as you can imagine I was preparing myself to be let down by these paints and told myself not to  get my hopes up too high.

I painted some splodges of paint onto A6 sheets of drawing paper, the instructions say use cartridge paper, I found ordinary printing/copier paper and drawing paper works well.

The paints themselves are fast drying, I only needed to get the heat gun out to speed up the thicker areas of paint I had applied.

Once dried, I used the iron on the hottest setting, and pressed the backgrounds onto the fabric until the paints transfered.

Wow! Instant printed fabrics!!

I was impressed, and that mucky old brown did indeed turn out to be a nice bright yellow afterall!!

The beauty of these paints is that you can use the painted backgrounds many times to transfer onto the fabric, you just get a slightly paler version of it each time. Also if you use a LOT of paint you get a nice brighter colour effect too. The hotter the iron, the better the paints transfer onto the fabric.

You can only transfer onto manmade fabrics such as evolon, lutradur, polyester, organza etc, but Colourcraft have a medium called ‘transfix’ which enables you to use these paints with natural fabrics such as silks and cottons too!

When your background will no longer transfer paint onto your fabric you still have a nice handmade background which you could use in cards or artist trading cards! So all is not lost

Heres my pictures below of the painted backgrounds I did on drawing paper, as you can see the colours arent all that nice on the paper:

These are the fabric versions of the painted backgrounds which I ironed onto white fabric:

Below are some postcard sized sheets of vilene which I also transfered some of the paints onto to see what they would look like:

I had a lotta fun playing with these paints and must experiment some more! In the meantime Ive got some nice new painted fabrics to embellish

Here they are, better late than never huh

Im really addicted to working with postcards with the sewing machine as they are a perfect size to experiment and play on – they arent too small and not too big

As usual, you can click on the images to see a bigger version:

Fused felting wool and fibers fused together on a sheet of iron on bondaweb to create a piece of handmade fabric.

Angelina film & fibers fused onto a sheet of black painted lutradur and the over stitched.

Pink felting wool fused onto a sheet of organza using bondaweb, I attached the fibers, yarns and ribbons using top stitching.

Felted Leaf Postcard, Im addicted to sewing with yellow cotton!!! Its so bright

Another piece of handmade fabric I made using felting wool and fibers fused together with bondaweb then embellished with stitches.

Black painted Lutradur, angelina fibers and ordinary fibers and yarn sewn with nice bright yellow thread Flower attached with brads (above and below)

Below is one of them stuffed art quilts I made using the instructions on Teesha Moore’s YouTube video, I decided to do mine on the sewing machine. I WAS going to make it into a large binder cover…BUT the cat stole it from me! I actually managed to take a picture off it after the cat finally got up off it….

So it WAS an art quilt but it ended up being a cat bed!!