I spent most of my time at Spring and Fall Quilt Market doing demonstrations. Whenever I do paintstik demos, the most common question I hear is “how do I clean up my brushes?” (Immediately followed by “how do I clean my stencils, rubbing plates, hands,” etc.) After playing with these paints for 10 years, I’ve […]
Simple Stenciled Lampshade
A few weeks ago, I showed you a photo from my booth at Quilt Market. We featured a number of home dec ideas using the new Forest Friends Rubbing Plates and Oliver Owl & Friends Stencils. Now that the stencils are in the warehouse and ready to ship, I want to share a few of […]
Shelly Recommends: Wreath Quilt Project
If you are like me, you like to take a little bit of time to do something creative before the Christmas holidays. I don’t always have time to make a lot of gifts, but I love to make a little something special to decorate the house. (Not to mention, I like to carve out some […]
Hedgehogs, Owls & Butterflies — Oh My!
If you love to make fabric art with kids – or for kids, you’ll love our new Forest Friends Collection! I had the good fortune to meet Alyssa Thomas of Penguin & Fish a couple of years ago on a flight home from Quilt Market. We had a great chat and Alyssa gave me her […]
Show & Tell Starts NOW!
As we were building our new website, my project manager told me about a really cool web-based service that makes it very easy to get feedback from customers and community members — people just like you. Last week, I signed up for a trial run, kicked the tires, and decided this looked like fun. Then […]
No More Boring Borders!
On Friday, a message arrived from Linda Clark (Ontario, Canada) to let me know she had been playing with Stencil Brush Rubbings. But here’s the catch… Linda did her experiments in January — long before I posted the article at the end of February. (If I were more technically savvy, I’d play the theme from […]
Add Autumn Leaves To Your Art With Paintstiks & Stencils
Jack and I took advantage of the warm weather on Sunday for a walk through Glendalough park for my birthday. He stopped me after a few minutes and handed me this beautiful maple leaf. Most of the trees are still green, but this one has started to change. While we were walking though the woods, […]
Split Leaf Stencils Are Here!
The latest addition to our DesignMagic line has arrived and is ready to ship. You can go directly over to the Online Store to place your order. Like all Design Magic stencils, this is a pair of stencils. One stencil has the positive image and the other has the negative image. When you paint these […]
Fargo Quilter Finds Fame In Design Magic Class!
It was a dark and stormy night… Oops! Wrong story. Let me start over… On a cold and snowy Friday in April, I ventured up to Fargo, North Dakota to teach a Design Magic class to a room full of adventurous quilters. We had a wonderful day! Here are just a few of the the […]
Go On Safari Without Leaving Home
For the past few weeks, I've been talking about some projects that you can do with Design Magic stencils. Today I want to show you a super-simple quilt that would look great from any Design Magic design. The quilt is called "On Safari" and you'll find the instructions in the project section of the Design [...]
Cool Curves Make Amazing Scrollwork
Last summer, I took part in the Merchant Mall at Bernina University in Orlando. Most of the people at the conference were sewing machine dealers and their employees. With my new Design Magic book in hand, I offered the dealers and shop owners a free DesignMagic stencil along with a free project. I was really […]
Start Simple with Placemat Project
In last Monday’s post, I talked about projects you can make with the Primrose Stencils including the big (huge?) Woodland Flowers Quilt. If you missed it, I also said this was NOT the first Design project I would tackle if I were new to paintstiks or Design Magic. (It’s not a difficult quilt, just a […]
