Paint a Bottle

 Here is something you may want to try.  I was really surprised at how nicely they turned out!  Ok, getting ahead of myself.  So let's start at what you will need.  You are going to need some glass bottles, colors of acrylic paint of your choice. Time and patience!

 What usually happens when I want to do a blog post is, I get so excited about what I am going to do, that I forget to get the pictures going.  I will try to do better at that, but here is an example of what you might choose.  These are small bottles, so use whatever ones you like.  I did wash the bottles first before I did anything else.  Some of them were kind of stained, and I wasn't sure how that would work, but it covered it up. I'm guessing how well they stained were covered and the colors of paint that I used were good for covering that up.  So you may have to play around with this for what you may do.

I began by thinning the paint, just a little.  The pink was pretty runny, so I didn't water that one down at all.  I poured some into the bottle and began turning the bottle and watching the paint cover the inside of the bottle.  I kept adding paint, as needed, to cover the whole inside of the bottle.  I laid them on their sides to dry.  I think they would look nice with some burlap flowers inside, or maybe some silk flowers.  Or maybe you'd like to see them on your window sill.  Hope you have fun making bottles whatever color you need them to be.

Stitch magic

 This post is about using a great product that will make your stitching so much easier. If you have ever wanted to do some stitching and had a very complicated design, you know it can be very time consuming to transfer that design to whatever you are stitching on to.  Especially, when you do your stitching on to, like our example, a black background.  This pattern was one done by Kathy Schmidt.

 There are several product out there, but the use of them is similar.  The one is Sulky and the other is Transfer-Eze.  So let's begin on the use of these products.  You will need a sheet, or sheets that cover your pattern design, a copy machine, and whatever you plan to do your stitching on to.  (fabric)  For our example we used a black cotton fabric and white DMC floss to stitch with.

 Since I started stitching this design, the pattern has been discontinued by the store that I purchased it from.  So for example, I used a different pattern.  You will need to place the pattern on your printer and know which side the paper side of the product is.  You will need to follow the manufactures directions.  But so you know what we are talking about, the product peels away from itself and is similar to a paper towel. 

 So when you have your pattern copied on to the product, you peel the design away from the paper, and place it on your fabric for stitching.   It is kind of sticky, but not so much so that you only have once chance to get it on straight. 

 Once you have the product with the design on it stuck to your fabric, you are ready for stitching.  You can see here that our design was bigger than just one sheet, so we needed to use two.  We overlapped them and did the stitching.

Here's an up close of what the stitching looks like.  When you are done the product is water soluble. I had a picture of this and it got erased, sorry.  But trust me it works!  You will need to put it in a bowl of water for about 5 minutes.  I washed my stitching after I was done with this last step.  I'm still looking for a frame to put it in. So I can't show you it framed yet.  Its a work in progress!  So next time you have a stitchery or embroidery that you would like to have an easy way to get your pattern to fabric, you may want to give this a try.