Transitioning

Thirteen years ago next month, I started this little blog.  Now 1,675 posts later, it is time to transition to something new. Over the years I've shared countless scrapbook layouts, self-published 4 books of scrapbook sketches and another ebook, and shared hundreds of video tutorials from my YouTube channel.  I've made cards, mixed media canvases, art journal entries and gelli prints.

Through my entries mostly related to scrapbooking I have shared techniques and quite a bit of my life.  I've enjoyed the creative process and appreciated the many comments received here and at YouTube.

All my life I have been a maker.  I started with embroidery and learned many other crafts.  I remember when my mother's oldest sister helped me first learn to sew and when my dad gave me my first sewing machine as I as about to start college.  In the late 1990's I started a business making custom window treatments and continued for 16 years.  Sewing was an early passion and has been a constant in my life for 40 years!

Over the last couple of years I have been doing more and more sewing and less scrapbooking.  I still create paper arts, mostly cards, to share.  Mainly I am now creating art quilts and really all types of quilts.  It's natural for me to return to fiber arts.  But I don't feel like I'm going back. I'm going forward with my sewing using all the ideas and techniques I've learned in the last 20 years of papercrafting.  It is very exciting to put it all together.

Today I launch a new website - lisaecherd.com - to share my art quilts, a new blog and a link to my updated Etsy site.  

This blog's website - lisaedesign.com - will remain in place.  You can find links to all my YouTube videos and scrapbook posts here.  I wasn't very good at keeping up the categories but there is a search feature.  The lisaedesign YouTube channel will stay in place and any new videos I create will also be posted there.  I am keeping the same Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

The only change is the blog. The new website has a blog feature and it is where I plan to post going forward.  There is a link on the new site back to this one if you ever need it.

Thank you for being part of my blogging and papercrafting journey so far.  I hope you will follow me to a new website and a new adventure in crafting.

So please visit me at:  lisaecherd.com

Selecting Stamp Sets

The more crafts I do, the less space I have to devote to each.  My stamp collection is taking up some valuable real estate in my craft space and I'd like to pare them down.  There are sets I'm definitely not using and some that I would like to use again.

In this video, I ask questions you can ask yourself about your stash or about sets you are thinking of purchasing.

I reference Stampin' Up! stamps but the ideas apply to any brand and I have more than just Stampin' Up! in my collection.

Thanks for visiting!

Last Chance for Sketchbooks

 HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I have some exciting arts and crafts plans for 2022!  Soon I will introduce you to a new website and blog.  Don't worry, the information here and the videos on YouTube will continue to be available.  Thank you for your comments and support over my almost 13 years of blogging.  Really?  13 years?  Yes, time flies...

As I move forward, I have decided to retire my 4 Sketchbooks created from 2013 through 2016.  These sketches are still a valuable resource for scrapbookers.  If you would like to purchase one or more sketchbooks you can find them on my Etsy shop until January 20.  (These are ebooks and are downloadable only.  You will not receive any printed materials.)

Each ebook sketchbook contains a sketch to scale for various types of scrapbook pages including both one and two page layouts.  Sketches are organized by the number of photos supported.  Many focus on the most common size of photos - 4"x6".  They make scrapbooking easier!

See my Etsy shop for purchase.

The last chance to buy a sketchbook is January 20, 2022.  After that the shop will be renamed and stocked with my new art.  

Hope you have a happy new year and have made some crafty plans of your own.

Painting Fabric

 

Just what I needed a new hobby!  Well, not totally new.  I quilt.  I gelli print.  I play with paint.  Now I'm doing them combined.  This little art quilt was made entirely with solid fabrics, paint and thread.  I only had two colors of fabric paint at the time so the color palette was a bit limited.  I snuck in a little permanent marker to fill in a couple of spots.

I'd had the paint for awhile and had experimented just briefly when it came in but hadn't had time to really dive into it.  To make the border fabrics, I used gelli printing, mostly with a 3x5 block.  This created pretty prints however the fabric cuts had to be fairly small.  Since I loved doing this so much I've bought several more colors and am experimenting using my 8x10 gelli plate.

On Craftsy I took a class from Heather Thomas and learned about drawing with your machine quilting.  She used some other products for coloring in but I stuck with the fabric paint and a brush.  It's a lot of fun!  

I was so pleased with this little quilt that it is hanging in my craft room. I'm so obsessed, I've abandoned fabric I had purchased for other projects to enjoy playing with paint and solid fabric.

Thanks for visiting today!

Art Quilt Play

Just playing with some scraps, various machine quilting threads and rulers.  As much as I love my Pfaff sewing machines, I could not get either my old basic one or my new one that is supposed to be more for quilting to work with a ruler foot. The thread would always break.

The new Handi Quilter Capri works easily with rulers which are really more templates to help quilt various designs cleanly.  I was still practicing on this piece.  The rulers would slip so I had some trouble keeping straight lines.  I just got in the little grippy things for the back of the rulers and no more sliding.  I'm practicing more on another quilt.

My husband found this little quilt this morning laying on the sofa and carried it into the bathroom to find me and tell me how much he liked it.  We debated which way it should go.  I designed it for the shaped pieced column to be on the right.  I know I've seen another quilt with that type of element somewhere but I could not find it to link it up.  It's shown here the other way up.

This was a fun little project just to practice.  It is hanging in my sewing room now as inspiration to keep creating.

(ETA this photo, unrelated but I need a place to link it:

Scrambled Stars

When in the craft room lately, I've been card making or sewing.  Recently I finished my first art quilt in many years.

I had this idea awhile ago of taking traditional blocks and mixing them up, literally.  In my original sketch the horizontal black bar was lower and the quilting had channels that helped it radiate from the center more distinctly.  Unfortunately, the time between the sketch and the making extended and I lost my plan a bit.  I got a bit too dazed by technology.

For many years I have used Powerpoint to lay out my quilts.  It's the software I had and knew. It wasn't that efficient but it worked.  With the last couple of quilts though, it had become very tedious.  There had to be something better.  A quick search yielded  EQ8 from Electric Quilt.  It looked to be the most popular quilt design software with plenty of features so I bought it and designed this quilt - without referring to my original sketch.

The software is easy to use and like a lot of software has more features than I really need and is a bit shy in some areas that I use more.  I'm learning as I go. I've already used it to design a simple Linus project quilt.  It was very helpful in determining the amount of fabric I needed and in trying various layouts.

For this quilt, I needed little fabric just a chance to play with different ones to get the effect I wanted.

While it is a bit different than the original sketch, it was an interesting change. This is the most white I've ever used in a quilt - or in a quilt I actually finished!  I'm really a color person and tend to like to fill the space I have so leaving so much literal white space was a challenge for me.

If you stop by for scrapbooking, please be patient with me. I've had a major life change in the last few months.  My mother passed away.  I haven't really been interested in scrapbooking and my time has been consumed with her affairs.  I don't know when I will return to scrapbooking but hope to get back to some type of videos this fall.

Thanks for visiting today.

  

Mixed Media Wall Art

One of the key goals of my redecorating last year was to create space for more art.  I hoped to find pieces that I really love and to showcase things that I made.  

The space over my server in my dining room is one where I hope to find a painting that I love.  We've actually been looking for something new for that space for about 3 years.  There is one piece we found about a year and a half ago that I wish I'd bought. Otherwise, nothing has been quite right. 

The painting I had here before is now in my living room so I was faced with a big open space in my decor.  I decided to create a mixed media space as a 'for now' piece.

When I first put this mixed media painting up, I didn't love it.  I really didn't like it.  The background of mostly turquoise shades and a little yellow and gold, I really liked.  I'd added the circles created with 5 different stencils using heavy gel medium colored with Stampin' Up! reinkers.  The circles didn't seem to fit and the red/rust ones particularly jumped out. They seemed to take over the room and I wanted a more subtle piece.

So I remembered what I'd learned about mixed media canvases from Christy Tomlinson that you need to use some of your foreground colors in the background. I started adding subtle touches to the background.  I would take it down and go back up to my craft room, add a little more paint/gel and then back up on the wall.  Over the next couple of days, I finally landed on the number of layers that made me happy. One thing I learned years ago when doing mixed media is that the key is knowing when to stop. When to say 'when.' 

I think I stopped at the right point and I like the piece.  I still don't love it but that's fine.  It is a place holder until I either find a painting I want to purchase or create something new for the space myself.

One thing I did learn is that I really like the portrait orientation for this space.  The first thing that hung here was a square wall quilt I made when we built the house.  Next I had a landscape oriented painting.  I think this 30x40 size is a good fit.

And guess what?  I had to really clean up my worktable to fit such a big canvas on it.  That inspired me to get back to my papercrafts.  I have a scrapbook page on my worktable in process!

Thanks for visiting today!

Ribbons and Jewels

 My crazy drapery project is complete!

In an earlier post, I explained why I'd gone off the crafting deep end and was embroidering my own drapery fabric.  Now a month or so later, the draperies are complete and hung. I'm delighted with how they turned out.  

I left the white Fabricut linen cotton blend unlined so they have a lighter look.  The fabric has substantial weight and body to it so they aren't skimpy.  To create the look, I used my Pfaff sewing machine to embroider each length with a top to bottom design zig and zagging back and forth in a light gray thread. I think of these as the ribbons. Then I added shorter straight rows of a variety of decorative stitches in gold, darker gray and beige threads  including a gold metallic.  They look like rows of gems to me sort of like straight earrings.  On the backside, I had some tearaway stabilizer pinned in place and tore it away from the stitches when each length was stitched.  It did a marvelous job of completely eliminating any puckering of the fabric as I'd had in my samples without stabilizer.

Since I was making the draperies, I knew how far apart to do the embroider and that I only needed it on the face of each pleat.  A perfect pattern repeat for a deep pleat on stationary panels is about 10 inches so that is what I did. The embroidery covers about 3 1/2 inches of each repeat so there isn't nearly as much embroidery as you might think to look at them.

Still the project took over 40 hours. That sounds like a lot until you think about the time invested in a quilt, crocheting a throw or knitting a sweater.  

Now that I have that white fabric out of my craft room, I can move onto some messier projects. The next thing I want to do is a mixed media canvas but I wouldn't dare get paint out until these were completely finished.

Thanks for visiting!