Inkodye and Vintage Inspiration Friday

I was sent three bottles of inkodye to play with and must say I had fun with it. It's a dye you just paint on and set in the sun to develop.  Within 5-10 minutes it's done!  Hopefully, if you try this product yourself, I can steer you away from a few mistakes :)  because I made some.

First the slide show:



Tips: what I learned
*sand wood first if you try it on wood.
*make sure your muslin (or fabric of choice) is prewashed!!  (dye washed off a bit on the new pieces I used)
*make sure you use recommended fabric, I grabbed a scrap and now realize it probably had polyester in it and some of the dye washed off.
*use the recommended strong detergent recommended on the site.  I used my Tide he  and it wasn't strong enough to adequately wash out all of the dye in areas I wanted to stay clear.
*saturate fabric but with no extra dye pooled.  Just nice even coat.
*I think masking needs to be done with tape and adhesive type of products.  It's hard to say how well the leaves worked because I hadn't prewashed the muslin.  I think they should have been flatter and tighter to the fabric
*I don't think white glue was a good resist (should buy the resist product if you need resist)

The dye worked great on the old feed sack, it was cotton and prewashed.  I also tried taping off an area and using rubber stamps (for a later posts) that worked great.

I dyed a feed sack for the leaves using the yellow green and black dye mixed together.

The small orange pumkin started with about a 16" diameter circle and the larger orange one, about 19".

Tutorial for the pumpkins is here.

What I loved:

*The odor of the product was minimal, just a slight ammonia smell.
*Clean up was easy.
*I used water to thin the dye
*Loved watching it develop and that it was fast.  In a couple of hours I got in a lot of experimentation!
*The black thinned with water is a nice gray.

These feed sacks are certainly vintage so I'm linking this post up with Debra for Vintage Inspiration Friday.

White Wednesday...the Wedding Revisited

I'm getting a Blurb book ready to order of my daughter's wedding (which was June 4) and thought I'd share some of the photographer's photos with you.

My favorite.

My first baby.  Now, married.  Now, with child herself!!!!!  I'm going to be a Grandma at the end of April!

The Grandpa to be is quite excited himself.  Wow, life is moving fast!  (I know Kyle's parents are also excited!)

Our family with our new son in law.

The wedding party.

Programs we made with paper from Hobby Lobby.  Our first plan didn't work and I have a packet of silver paper waiting for a project. 

Boutonnieres we made.

Our photographer was Royce of  Royce Studio from Omaha.  She was just so laid back and we just loved her.

My little gals right before the wedding.

In keeping with the natural theme, I made pen holders from more pieces of branches.

Lauren made a Blurb guest book with their engagement photos.  It turned out really neat as she added fun quotes here and there to it too.

Our family wedding tree display.

The card cage.

The reception was at my brother in law and sister in laws' vineyard.  Beautiful place!

Annette from Annette's catering and desserts made the cake, desserts, and catered dinner for us.  Can't say enough with how pleased we were with all of her services.

We emailed her a picture of the cake topper we made and some ideas for the cake.  I love what she did.  Natural and elegant.

Soooo pretty.

NY Cheesecake with lots of toppings.

We had bite sized desserts along with the cheesecake. 

The flowers were sooo pretty from abloom florist in Lincoln.

My second oldest daughter was the Maid of Honor.  

Simple place card holders.

Love candlelight :)

The favor boxes held Baker's Chocolates.

The stamped forks.

Gosh, it was fun.

My son in law said he couldn't dance.  They almost didn't have one.  He said he didn't like to dance.  Lauren had never danced more than once with him.  They practiced at home a bit.  HE DANCED ALL NIGHT and he was GOOD!

My husband and I aren't good dancers but we really don't care.  We like to once in awhile anyway. :)

The book hearts held up well actually.  The tutorial can be found here.

If not candles, then torches :)

She took a long nap after the wedding and woke up to eat dinner and dance.  I made the hair pins for the girls from the dress I wore at my sister's wedding last fall.  My son walked by the ironing board, knocked the iron over on the dress and melted it.  So....I was thinking about using it anyway.  That just convinced me to do it. 

If you're new here, you can read more about the wedding projects here.

Now, I guess there may be some baby projects, woohoo!!

I'm linking up with Kathleen at Faded Charm.

Texture Tuesday

The theme at the Cafe for Texture Tuesday is "love"...

I used Kim's new free texture "fall in" in two layers followed by "magic canvas".

My youngest was dancing around outside while I was cleaning up some pieces  and I stopped her for a quick picture.  I don't know how she gets the oreos to outline her lips so perfectly, but she does.  Every time. :)

Saturday Digest

• The butterflies have been abundant in the tank garden.  New yellow ones showed up yesterday.  I planted fennel for the caterpillars, but they have also devoured the dill, the parsley, and the small snapdragons.  The fluttering life is worth every plant sacrificed!

• This 2 minute 15 second video humbles me.  This is recycling that makes a difference for a people who live in a world I do not know.
• This preprinted sampler, also seen here would be neat to highlight vintage fabrics or a collection of small objects!  Thanks Vanessa!
• I hope you're having a great weekend!

Warm 'N Toasty Pumpkins

Well sweater pumpkins seem to be pretty popular and I know why, they are really neat!  There also are a few tutorials available on the internet to make them yourself.

You can find one here at hummadeedledee.  And, another here at Small Fry & Co.

I found 4 great sweaters to use for pumpkins at a huge garage sale last weekend.  All sized kids to teens.   One went to my daughter's closet though when we got home.  :)

I certainly don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I will show you a couple of pictures of how I made them just because it's a combination of the two tutorials linked above.

For the small pumpkins in the cloches I cut a sleeve off one sweater and then cut it into five pieces.  Each is somewhere between 3"-4" long.  The bigger pumpkins were from pieces of the other sleeve about 6"-8" long.

To make the bottom of the pumpkin:

1. Turn the piece wrong side out. 

2. Gather the wider end with a long running stitch and pull tight. (no picture, sorry.)

3. Pull the gather stitch up and with your thread still intact begin stitching your gathered bottom together, forming the bottom of the pumpkin.

4. Turn the pumpkin right side out.

5. Fill with a ball of polyfill. I used batting because I have two big bags of scraps of it that I want to use up.  I just pulled the batting apart and formed it into a ball.

6. Gather the top of the pumpkin together and hold with clothespins or have someone help you...or be very coordinated and hold it with your hand while you tie the string around.

7. Tie it up tight with string or twine, yarn, etc....whatever you want.

8. Continue to wrap the stem with your choice of  fiber.  Since I'm a string fan, that's my choice.  

9. Secure the end with a bit of hot glue.

10. Thread a big needle with strong or double thread again and take stitches down from the top of the pumpkin, out the center of the bottom of the pumpkin, back up from the bottom and out the top.  Continue pulling tight and taking stitches until you have shaped the pumpkin to your liking.  I took about 6 stitches in each.  Then knot the thread at the bottom.

Your done.

I think you'll have fun making some!

The same but different:  I made these out of an old feed sack.  However didn't take stitches to form them.  I broke two needles trying to however.  The fabric was stronger, the pumpkins bigger, and my batting really thick on the inside.  Its OK because they shaped really well anyway.

More on the orange pumpkin on next week.  I used inkodye!

Update: Another fall project can be found here. (felt coasters)
And a fall wreath project here.

I'm linking up with:

 Fix It Up Friday 

I'm Lovin It at Tidymom.com

A Couple of Sweet Buys

I've had the pleasure of an auction and quite a few garage sales over the past 2 weeks.  I haven't taken pictures of all the treasures, but just had to show you two of my favorites.

This table was holding items for sale at a garage sale.  Usually when you see a piece used for display and ask if it's for sale, it's not...but, this time it was!

It's has a beautiful rust patina and get this, it's collapsible!!  It's a folding table and the legs easily fold down into the top.  It needs a good cleaning followed by a spray coat of finish and will be just perfect.

On the same outing, I found a LARGE bag of vintage fabric scraps!  The table is 4' by 2' so you can see this a quite a pile.  They were all compacted too.  Once I started "fluffing" them the pile grew!

I picked out a few of the scraps to show you why I was excited.

A great variety!

Just some seriously cool vintage patterns. 

It is possible this may not excite everyone :)

Besides all the scrappy projects that I will use these in, I'd like to come up with some sort of display to just showcase vintage prints.  I keep thinking of small squares of the prints on a canvas.  I'd love to hear any ideas that you may have!