RBG Tiny Art Show

We need your submissions to make our tiny art show great!

Ms. Jaimee’s submission is trucking along!

All artists young and old are welcome!

Parent’s : use this display of art and the creation of the art as a tool to have family discussions about RBG, The Supreme Court, Voting and Election Day!

Let’s all channel our Election Day anxieties into creating some awesome art inspired by an awesome example of wit, determination, strength and innovation.

Cup and Cake for @sewasoftie

Happy Friday! We are back on the blog promoting #sewasoftie for Mrs. Trixi of @sewasoftie! Each day of the month of July there is a fabulous teacher showing our at-home hand sewers a different adorable stuffy to sew. We are super lucky to share our day today with Julia of Old Spool Sewing! Check her out on insta at @Julia_oldspoolsewing. She made a narwhal pattern for you to make!

Make sure to head over to @sewasoftie to see all of the neat projects that are available!

So, of course we had to think of our favorite softie patterns that we would want to share with the hand sewers of the globe and of course, we had to include our signature CUP and CAKE!! These are our most famous stuffies that we have been making for the last five years that bring the big time love from all of our sewers.

Links to the tutorials:

cup: http://paintboxartstudio.com/mini-hand-sew-cup/

cake: http://paintboxartstudio.com/mini-cake-stuffie-hand-sew/

And, I can personally attest to the fact that babies and dogs love these also!!

Have fun and please tag us with your work on insta so we can see!! @paintboxartstudio.

Doll Makeover

Remember when we sewed a doll in quarantine week one out of the dish rags we had hanging around the house? If you don’t.. see our ‘come sew with me’ post where we give you the doll pattern and a pattern for a horse too. Fast forward a few week and our Doll got a make over!

I have included a shorts and shirt pattern for both your doll and your horse below. The instructions are the same.. stitch together your shirt at the shoulder and the side seam and your shorts at the side seam and the crotch. Make sure when you print these patterns out you select ‘fit to page’ for a 8.5×11 sheet. This should fit our previous doll pattern perfectly.

Then you just shove her malleable body into the shirt and shorts. The one adjustment you will need to make(photo below): once the shorts are on, pinch the back to make them tight and then stitch in place.

You can add your own special details to your shirt or shorts. Our shirt has a sewn on collar and some embroidery detail. For her face, we used embroidery floss and for her her hair, we just stitched down some fabric.

Here is a shot of the back pant pinch

Happy Decorating!

Silly Face Flip Books!

Hi everyone, Amy here! Who wants to make some hilarious flip books with me? These are super fun and easy to make with materials around the house. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Cut Your Paper

Start by cutting down some watercolor paper or card stock–something a bit heavier than computer paper. I chose for my book to be 4.5″x6″, so I cut two pieces to that size for the front and back covers, and then I cut all of my inserts to 4.5″x2″. I chose to do 5 sets of eyes, noses and mouths, but you can make as many as you want!

Step 2: Draw Some Silly Eyes

Grab as many inserts as you are using for your eyes, and start with a pencil. Using a very light hand, draw some eyes on each of your papers. It’s a good idea to mess around on some scratch paper ahead of time and choose your favorites from there! Once you’ve nicely drawn your eyes on, color them in and use a permanent marker to outline them. After that’s done, you can erase any pencil marks so they look nice and clean! Set aside.

I added in the “cutie eyes” for all of our studio kids. They’re a big hit!

Step 3: Draw Some Silly Noses

Repeat step 2, but with noses. Animal noses are always fun to incorporate! I love clown noses.

Fun fact: For those of you who don’t know, I was in a circus growing up!

Step 4: Draw Some Silly Mouths

Again, repeat the previous two steps to make your mouths! Facial hair anyone?

Step 5: Punch Your Holes

Using a hole punch, punch holes on the left hand side of all of your inserts. Make sure you get them in as close to the same spot as possible! Then, line up some insets over your cover, mark where your holes should be, and punch your three holes on the left hand side of your front and back cover.

Step 6: Draw Your Cover

I chose to write “Silly Face Flip Book” on my cover, but yours can be anything you’d like! If you want it to be a bunch of silly faces, great! Or, how about floating eyes, noses and mouths all over the front and back! Ooo, I like that idea. I might go back and make a second option.

Whatever you decide, start with a pencil and use a light hand once again. Then, color it in and go over it with marker so it looks nice and clean.

Step 7: Assemble Your Flip Book

Line up all of your eyes at the top, noses in the middle and mouths on the bottom. Put them in between your two covers and tie bows through the holes on the left hand side. You can use yarn, embroidery floss, jute string, anything you’ve got! I used kitchen twine because it was all I had at home, but it looks just fine to me!

Voila! Time to Play!

Flip through your book and see what silly combinations you can come up with. Have fun!

Tablecloth Playhouse

This is an adorable at home project that will keep your children happy and busy. What more could you want? The video below has step by step instructions, so follow along and have a playhouse made out of old bed sheets in no time!

Materials: Extra sheets and a homemade window frame pattern.

Step 1: Lay the sheet over your table and pin the sides shut. Then, draw a line as your guide for sewing and sew the four sides shut. Once they’re sewn, it will fit perfectly over your table.

Step 2: Cut a door. Using a pillow case as a template for size, cut out the door from a different material and pin it to the front of your sheet.

Step 3: Making the window template frame. The frame is a 10×10 square, and inside draw 4 even squares to make it look like a four pane window. Cut them out.

Step 4: Cutting the windows. Cut out the windows in a different fabric than the house is made of (perhaps the same as the door). You want two window pieces cut. Then, pin them to either side of the house.

Step 5: Fold in the raw edges of the door and pin. Then, draw a line up the middle of the door and pin that as well.

Step 6: Sew your door and both your windows down.

Step 7: Cut out the squares in the windows, and cut straight up the middle of the door.

Step 8: Return the tablecloth to the table and start to play!

Grab Bag 3 – Mini Easter Worlds

We love all mini worlds, and these Easter ones are no exception!  We are super proud of the mini animals and egg baskets that were made out of the clay—really happy that was put to good use!  We were also VERY excited to see a real egg incorporated.  Good job everyone!

This week’s winner is….. CATHERINE HYSLOP!  “Bunny Beach” is too adorable, and so very San Diegan.  The mini surfing bunnies with eggs on their boards is so clever.  Also, really love the ladybug catching a ride on the chick.  Good job Cat!  Free bag for next week, woohoo!

Let’s check out everyones projects, shall we?

Amelia:

Billie:


Bria:

Cat:

Emmy:

Lila:

Olivia:

Willa:

Winston:

Hand Blown Eggs

In simpler times we had a really fun adult egg paint at MRH Interiors. So fun!

For you Easter celebrators! We love doing hand-blown eggs around the studio during the spring months and sadly, this year it’s not to be!

But, you can easily blow out eggs at home! Just use a big needle to make a small hole on top of the egg and you make a slightly bigger one on the bottom. My mom likes to shake the egg before blowing to break everything up. Once you poke the holes, you just get in there and blow.

What follows is truly gross but it will only take a minute to get the job done. After blowing out the yolk, we like to run them under cold water and blow that out as well…

egg top
egg bottom

Once your egg is good and cleaned out, get your paint on! You should make a small ring out of paper and tape to hold your egg. We use acrylic paint and don’t seal them after.. but you can. If you want to add some extra fun, I always like doing the cross lines with hot glue and filling them in. I also used white out that we had around our vacation home to do the white dots on the green egg. Bonus points for gold pen and gold foil.

Here are some sweet egg ideas! If you were in our animal drawing class this week, you now know how to make every bunny pose and this amaze chicken. Send us your egg pics! We love painting eggs.

If you want to *hang* your eggs, perhaps on a cute egg tree, you can! Make your holes a little bigger and insert a ribbon. The bottom will have a knot to hold it in place and you will tie it onto your tree with the top of the ribbon.

Happy Decorating!!

Shibori Time

Yesterday was Amy’s bday – I hope everyone gave her a ton of love! I really wanted to finish this post for her bday but the truth is, I am really enjoying my family time during this quarantine and after 5:30 we eat dinner together and play cards for 5 hours. So, I have been a little lax on my blog posting. To make up for it, I have 2 easter blog posts.. one sewing and one art and a fantastic sewing instruction from Ms. Deanna that will all go up before the weekend!

Since I am trapped far away from my art studio, I want the focus of these lessons to be what everyone can do from home, without all of the fancy supplies from the studio. For this lesson, we found some old pillow cases from the cupboard and bought the rest of the supplies from good old Vons. I understand if the Vons near you feels infectious. We are very lucky to have a very low traffic Vons where we are. As an alternative to blue dye, you may consider purple from cabbage juice. We tried it and it worked swimmingly.

Here is my Shibori lesson brought to you by myself and Ava P, who was really the driver of this whole project. Her dying skills are insane. We picked out 4 different kinds of Shibori dye techniques for you: Kanoko, Itajime, Arashi, and Kumo. We finished up with a couple of our tie dye favorites with the left over dye. We will tackle each type one by one…

Supplies

  • Fabric: old sheet/pillow case, Cotton based tee shirt.
  • Rit Navy Blue dye (available at Vons). We also had leftover Purple Cabbage Juice from an awesome science experiment we did earlier in the week which makes a really nice deep purple color if you don’t have anything else. You just cut the cabbage and boil it for a few hours and let sit overnight. Bonus: If you add baking soda to cabbage juice it turns bright teal for bright teal dying.
  • Salt
  • Water – boiled
  • dish soap
  • Rubber Bands
  • Cardboard from the inside of a paper towel roll
  • 2 pieces of cardboard – rectangles.

It’s important to note that the internets told us to wet some of the fabrics before we dyed. But, we ignored and it still turned out ok.

KANOKO

Let’s start with the Kanoko. We will go through each folding process and then show the dying at the end as we dyed all of our folded fabrics at the same time. This one is the easiest so it’s a good warm up.

you just pinch little areas of fabric like you are putting pony tails in your hair and rubber band them all over.

KUMO

Kumo is the bullseye.. you pinch the middle of the fabric and let it hang, then rubber band as far as you want the bullseye to be.

See.. then you have a horn.

ARASHI

Arashi turned out super cool. All internet videos we watched used a PVC pipe to wrap but since paper towel is so in vogue, we used the cardboard from the middle of the paper towel holder and it worked fabulously.

You start with an accordion fold..

Attach your fabric to the top of your cylinder with a rubberband

Then wrap it around and rubberband.

ITAJIME

This one is so rad. It involves a lot of folding but its worth it! Our folding was a complete train wreck and not perfect like the videos we watched but it still looked super cool.

you start by folding each side into the middle

Then you fold in half again..

Then you do a flag fold… in person ours was so bad that I made a diagram instead lol. I give you.. Flag Fold!

You fold your flag all the way up until you have a little triangle that looks like a spanakopita. Then.. you put it between 2 cardboards and rubber band it. On the net, there were many perfect versions that used clamps. But, ours still worked.

After you sandwich and rubber band it looks like a s’more. I wish I had a s’more right now.

DYING PROCESS

We threw everything in this big trough because it allowed us the space to throw all of the pieces in at once. The amount of supplies we used would dye probably 25 projects. we only had 7 pieces. Oof.

To dye 25 pieces you use 3 quarts water, 1/8 cup salt, a couple drops of dish liquid and a whole container of RIT dye. We wanted it to be super dark so we used the whole thing.

We started by sprinkling the salt and then adding dots of dish soap. Then we added the boiling water and finally, the dye..

One by one we put our folded pieces in the dye with tongs. We let them sit in the dye for about 5 minutes to fully saturate.

Mari and I were a super big help.

The horn of plenty.

After we realized we had so much dye, we went around the house desperately searched for more things to dye. We found onesies.

For these onesies, we used some classic tie dye techniques that we use often at the studio. If you have extra pieces and you want to depart from traditional shibori.. you may want to add these.

SPIRAL

Start in the middle of your fabric or wherever you want your spiral to center. Pinch the middle and turn like a cinnamon bun.

Wrap it up with rubberbands.

and.. viola! Not the best spiral, but cute none the less.

MEGATWIST

The megatwist is our all time favorite dye pattern. I’m sure someone created it and calls it something special, but Ava just started doing this one back in the day on a whim and it stuck. It turns out so good every time.

To megatwist, you straighten out your fabric and you guessed it.. twist.

Twist until you can twist no more. Then rubberband.

See.. so good.

Now back to dying –

Like I said before, we let the pieces sit in the dye for a few minutes to saturate.

Then, we took them out one by one and rinsed in cold water.

We kept rinsing until no dye came out. Then we let them sit in a pot overnight which I feel contributed to their success after washing.

We washed on warm not hot and on a delicate cycle at first and the result was awesome! Once you are done feel free to take a Shibori photoshoot.

Ok – now go dye stuff! We want to see. Send us an email to jaimee@paintboxartstudio or tag us on insta!