Textile adventures | Colorado Springs Artist

My studio table has been taken over by my sewing machine. I'd be hard pressed to find my brushes and easel and canvases under the mess; most of the area is covered with fabric scraps, random spools of thread, pins, and miscellaneous bags filled with sewing goodies. I've mostly been custom tailoring shirts (both for my husband and myself), but I've also made curtains, bench covers, and a variety of alterations.

The most recent project was inspired by a gift of two oversized men's t-shirts. They were standard in every way, and much too large, so I immediately started the reconstruction. In fact, I got so swept up that I forgot to take a "before" picture of the blue shirt, but on the left below you can see what the original size and shape looked like:





I wasn't about to stop there, though. We're on our last vacation period before the fall semester starts, so we picked up a used Nintendo GameCube and have been playing Mario Party and Mario Kart like the happy geeks we are. And since I have a special fondness for Yoshi, I decided to take the brightly colored shirt to the next level:





I've never stenciled anything before, and I'm extremely happy with the result. It was fairly painstaking to complete...the tip of my right pointer finger is still numb from pressing against the exacto knife for hours, and my neck has a decent crick in it, but it was so worth it.

Meanwhile, my husband has been using an old AOL messenger/laptop bag for school. In April we celebrated our 4 year anniversary, so I got him a collection of Doctor Who mini pins, one for each of the 11 doctors. He'd been wanting to put the pins on his bag, but wasn't happy with the big embroidered AOL logo--so we worked together to create a sturdy cover, and then I splattered "stars" and painted the new Doctor Who logo on the front. By the time we were done, I was pretty jealous:





But it's ok--I have my Yoshi to keep me happy. : P