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New Cow and Highland Cow Embroidered Felt Ornament Patterns!
Today the blog has been invaded by a herd of cows! Cows and Highland Cows have been some of my most requested animal ornament designs. My grandparents had a dairy farm in upstate NY and I have a lot of fond memories of cows and visiting the farm when I was a kid. I decided that the shapes would be so similar that it would be easy to put both a holstein cow and a highland cow in the same pattern so you can make whichever version you love.
I started this design with a sketch. You can see I [read more…]
Halloween 2025: He Slobbered Me
Almost 20 years ago, I made some Halloween costumes and we staged a photo. We grew up with the tradition of everyone we knew sending holiday cards with a photo of the family with matching sweaters. It’s just what you did. So, I sent greetings to all of our friends and family, but I realized that staged holiday photo just wasn’t us.
So we put our Halloween photo in our holiday cards. People got such a kick out of it that we did it the next year. And soon it was a new family tradition. A few weekends before Halloween every [read more…]
Art Word of the Week: Bleed
Bleed seemed like a great Art Word of the Week leading up to Halloween. But don’t worry, it’s nothing too scary. I use the word bleed two ways in my art practice. The first one refers to what happens when dye colors don’t stay where they are supposed to be. The photo above shows a piece of felt I laid on top of a dyed fabric. The dye colors transferred and bled all over my felt which ruined this particular project. Oops.
The second way I use the word “bleed” is when I [read more…]
Art Word of the Week: Grain
Another art term I use a lot when I am teaching is grain. Grain is used to describe features of lots of kinds of art materials, but I’ll talk about the ones I use the most: paper and fabric.
In paper, the grain is the direction that the paper folds most easily. Papers like origami paper are made to have very little grain, so they fold easily in any direction. But papers like watercolor paper have a really strong grain which means they fold much more easily in one direction than the other. The image above shows the same piece of [read more…]
Hi, I’m Becka.
Talking about fabric design, teaching, and the life and business of being an artist.
Teaching online and in person classes in embroidery, handcrafts, technology, fabric design and artist business skills. Co-author of The Spoonflower Handbook.
Making books, paper art and fiber art geekery.
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