Tutorial for Beaded Cascade Earrings

New beading tutorial! Finally!

I call them Cascade Earrings. They’re for those of us who like itty bitty seed beads.

Find it here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1446919002/

Learn to Make Geometric Color Wheels with Watercolor Paint

My new watercolor tutorial on color wheels gives an advanced beginner’s lesson on how to paint artistic color wheels in a full rainbow of colors. 

Learn how to paint extraordinary color wheels using just 2, 3, 4 or 5 pigments. The tutorial include 4 projects, explained over 29 pages, including 77 illustrations and full color photographs of 7 paintings that are all explained in the text. This tutorial includes templates for 4 different projects for you to trace or copy.

Start with detailed step-by-step instructions for a painting that uses just two pigments. From there you will learn to mix three, four, and even five pigments to create increasingly complex compositions. There is lengthy discussion about choosing specific pigments for each of the four projects so you can do the projects more than once and get different effects depending upon the colors you start with. If you love colors, you'll love this tutorial on painting color wheels and making the projects.

Tools & Materials: watercolor paint, watercolor paper, palette with wells for mixing colors, pencil, kneaded rubber eraser, brushes: round size 3 and 6 (or similar), cup(s) of water, water dropper, paper or cloth towel, hair dryer, and a way to transfer the templates (discussed in the text).

Don’t just make swatch charts. Make art.

Color Wheels in Watercolor Paint

My favorite art to make lately has been painting color wheels with watercolor paint.  This probably my favorite one so far. It is a color study of five pigments.

Sometimes I include color wheels into larger compositions.

Sometimes I paint little color wheels to test out colors or an idea for future reference. I made this color wheel to test out a very red heavy color wheel.  It uses both black and red ink. 

 

I used that color wheel to paint this piece.

I'm making myself a little book of color swatches, including a few color wheel, such as this one.  

I used that one to help me paint this piece.

Some of my color wheels use a combination of traditional watercolor paint and mica paint, which looks metallic and flashes in the light. See the rainbow flash?

This color uses two reds, two yellows, and two blues, mixed in pairs.

Same with this one. Plus a cat.

This color wheel also uses two yellows, two reds, and two blue, plus I used colored pencil on top to add the shading.

Thanks for looking at my color wheels. If you would like to purchase one of my original paintings, with or without color wheels, have a look in my Etsy shop, gwenbeads, under the section on 2D art. 

 

Seahorse Shirt Hand Stitched in Cotton Jersey

I enlarged one of Marty Kenney’s doodles of a seahorse to make a stencil and then hand stitched this appliqué. This became the sleeve of a cotton t-shirt.

I had originally embroidered the seahorse to a front panel. No matter how I looked at it, the placement was unflattering. So the piece sat unfinished for eight months until I decided to move the embroidery to the sleeve. That’s why it has extra seams.

I designed the rest of the shirt to go with the seahorse. I wanted the seahorse to be the focus, the most detailed part, with the rest of the shirt simple, but not plain. After much thought and deliberation, I decided to add a trim to the rest of the t-shirt. Here you can seek all of the trim on the front, back, and second sleeve. A little appliqué like this is not only decorative, but also serves a purpose. It keeps the edge from rolling too much. I learned these sewing techniques from the books of Alabama Chanin.



Stitch, stitch, stitch...



Next I assembled the pieces. The finish on the neckline is my own invention. Learn to sew the neckline here: https://gwenbeads.blogspot.com/2019/12/t-shirt-with-stretchy-noodle-binding-on.html

Since there’s no tag, I like stitching a little doodad at the top back. That way, when I pick it up, it’s easy to tell which side is the front..

Here’s the doodad.
 

Notice the parallel whip stitch where the sleeve connects to the bodice. I use whip stitch for the sewing and top stitching on that seam to make it stretchy. It’s a lot more comfortable for me when it’s stretchy there.

3/4 sleeve. Long enough to cover most of my butt. Deep neckline.

 I’m going to get a lot of wear out of this come spring. 

Thanks for looking!

T-shirt with Stretchy Noodle Binding on Cotton Jersey

I finished sewing a T-shirt for my sweetie for his holiday present. It’s hard to buy him gifts, but he always wears the T-shirts I make him. This shirt is entirely hand stitched in cotton jersey, using techniques I learned from the books by Alabama Chanin.

My sweetie like AV equipment and electronics. So I made this stencil just for him. I appliquéd the design with backstitch.

Here, I used my original binding technique with a jersey noodle. This is the second shirt I’ve made with this edge treatment, and I really like it.

I cut the strips of cotton jersey 1.25” wide before stretching them into noodles. Then I appliquéd the noodle to the edges in two passes as I show in the drawings here.

It’s easy to do this binding on the neckline because you don’t have to ease it like you do with Alabama Chanin’s folded binding, which I find to be a particularly difficult task to do on curved necklines. The fold-over step with the noodle automatically makes the noodle shorter than the finished neckline, making it just the right tightness. Here you can see the fold-over step half done.

So the finished neckline is taught and stretchy. Next time, on the sleeve ends, I’ll ease the noodle a little (with a shorter noodle) because I think it belled a little, and a little taper there at the ends of the sleeves would have been better and could have been solved with some easing.

Thanks for looking. Happy holidays!

Doodle No. 37 Three Cats of Dr. Caligari

Never be afraid to go full rainbow. 

Prismacolor black ink, Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, Finetec and other mica watercolor paint on Stonehenge 250 GSM 100% cotton paper

4”square

See the flash of the mica.

Sold

Doodle No. 36 Calling Sector 7

This doodle has more mica paint than the others. 

5” square

I thought you might like to see how I layered the colors. The finished piece is bottom right. 

Drawn with archival Prismacolor black ink, Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, Finetec and other mica watercolor paint on Arches 300 GSM 100% cotton paper. 

Original available: https://www.etsy.com/listing/708956750/

Thanks for looking.