Art Prompt: stripes and stencil combination

I am pleased to share with you one of my first paintings. I am so thrilled about the new book The Paintbrush Playbook: 44 Exercises for Swooshing, Dancing, and Making Dazzling Art With Your Brush which is filled with a wealth of great starting points to make art.

I used the gradient wash technique as my inspiration to make this background. The book calls for this technique to be done with watercolors but I simply tried it with acrylics in blue, white and just a touch of green to make blended horizontal stripes.

The second element to this painting was an eye chart made with a Tim Holtz Eye Chart Stencil. I like it the way it is with just these two  features but I may add more at another point.

More about the Quarry Book:

Sketch and paint right on the pages of this fun, modern, approachable practice and inspiration book focusing on one of the most popular drawing tools - the paint brush.
This playful, colorful exercise book is filled with fun, contemporary, beautiful illustrations by leading illustrator Ana Montiel.

The exercises explore mark making, patterns, geometrics, simple drawings, texture, and composition and includes professional tips and tricks that will enhance your skills as you work through the book. Each spread has one page filled with art examples and an exercise, with plenty of room to draw or paint right in the book. The Paintbrush Playbook is printed on high-quality, uncoated paper, allowing you to paint or draw anywhere that inspiration strikes.

Explore abstract drawing, pattern drawing, meditative doodling and more with this all-in-one learning and practice book. This is a great volume for artists, designers, doodlers, illustrators, painters, pattern illustrators, and zentanglers of all ages. You will not want to miss it!

How to make a bunny bookmark with an Annie's Macaroni and cheese box

This is just a cute and simple fun way to make a recycled bunny bookmark with the tab from the box of Annie's Macaroni and cheese. These could be a cute Easter project to use in a bunny story book.

Simply cut the side tab out along the corners of the box. Then very carefully with an x-acto knife cut the perforated lines on the box. Yup, that simple. And as you can see the little bunny ears stick out above the top edge of the book and look so cute!

 I will be making some projects from this super cute The Paper Hat Book: Super Hats for Super Kids book that include a lot of recycled materials like food boxes and pother pretty packaging.


Hats are pure fun and the perfect item to cap off any costume or ensemble. The right headgear ensures complete transformation, especially on the head of an imaginative child.

The Paper Hat Book offers creative families 20 fantastic paper hats, all of which can be created quickly and easily from readily accessible papers: shopping bags, newspapers, comics, recycled story books, magazines, packaging scraps, and junk mail!

Artist and designer Alyn Carlson creates hats that are perfect for birthday parties, playdates, costumes, and everyday dress up. Each hat can be styled to perfectly suit the wearer by merely selecting the right paper and colors. The hat themes range from Floral Flappers to Viking Warriors, and from superheroes and pirates to beautiful butterfly hats.

Alyn Carlson is an artist, designer, stylist and part time chicken rancher living in a converted church who believes in setting the table for the muse. Always in search of the line, font, pattern, seed, flavor, musical note to be placed at the right time in the right place. As a paper artist, her extraordinary hats, suitable for children and adults for a garden party, whimsical wedding, a paper-lover's birthday party or just-because, have been featured in countless blogs and in the current issue of Uppercase Magazine. Alyn is also featured in the best selling Design Sponge book.

How to make a recycled wine crate footstool

I am always looking for fun ways to use my fabric stash and create pretty storage in my home. Today's recycled wine crate foot stool project does just that!

The cushion top is made with Foamology Twelve Piece Design Foam  and 12 of my favorite quilt fabric pieces along with some scrap wood, buttons and 4 wooden ball feet.

My wine crate wasn't the exact size of the Foamology Twelve square Foam  piece so I made the lid a bit bigger. I didn't know exactly how much extra puffy the foam would be with the fabric on it so I decided to cover it first before I made the frame lid.

I wanted to fussy cut some of the fabric to include images and text so I made a velum template.

Once my foam was covered I measured it and cut some strips of wood to make the frame and a piece for the lid base.

 I glued the frame together and made sure it was square with my quilt ruler and the lid base as a guide.

Then I put the cushion into the frame and glued it down to the lid base holding it secure with a c-clamp on each corner.

I glued dice on the underside of the lid in each corner so that the lid would not slide around.

To embellish the cushion frame I cut the shanks off of a variety of buttons USING EYE PROTECTION!!!!!! as the shanks can go flying even if you are holding the button with the shank side down.

 I made 4 rows of buttons to make sure I had a nice variety for each side. All that was left to do was glue the buttons around the frame border and the ball feet on the bottom of the wine crate.

 If you like making things with fabric the book

1000 Quilt Inspirations: Colorful and Creative Designs for Traditional, Modern, and Art Quilts

is a great resource for tons of ideas: