Monday, August 26, 2013

Easy Peasy Wall Art Revisited

Creating Easy Fabric Wall Art

One of our more popular blog posts was a DIY Tutorial from 2011: EASY PEASY WALL ART.  We shared and demonstrated how to attach fabric to an old or used canvas, as shown below.


This past week we shared our crafting knowledge, skills and tools with two young roommates furnishing their first college apartment.

Their fabric choice: "In Crowd" by Alexander Henry.  Quite "hip", isn't it!


Using a canvas they purchased for $3, they got right to work with the staple gun and scissors.


 Stretch, smooth, staple, stretch, smooth, staple, cut and repeat....


Picking Daisies was quite a center of activity and creation that day...


And Voila!  Easy Peasy!  Here they are, showing off their finished product, though there was some attempt to upstage the faces on the fabric.


It's at home in their apartment now - just look at this stylish hallway!



Monday, August 19, 2013

Merchant and Mills

Meet my new obsession...


I want to buy everything they sell, do everything they do, and be everything they are.

But in the interest of sanity, for now I will just focus on their patterns.  I've purchased two (so far!) and both have been a dream to sew.  I had never sewn using a "card pattern" before, and now that I have, it will be hard to go back to traditional paper patterns.

Plus!... it arrived all the way from England rolled in a tube, which seemed so special.


The first dress I made is their "Factory Dress", shown below.  My finished dress is on the left and their model is showing off their version on the right.  I made mine using the fabric pictured:  Robert Kaufman's Yarn-Dyed Essex that we sell here at Picking Daisies.  It is a linen and cotton blend.  I love the visual texture, weight and drape of this fabric, and am thinking about making this dress again using one of the other colors we carry.  And it will also be fun to make one in one of the cotton prints we have.


The second dress I made is their "Shirt Dress", shown below.  Again it was a delight to sew.  I completed the entire dress in about 5 hours yesterday.  The only "whoops" is that the wonderful fabric I chose (from Art Gallery's Indian Summer line) makes it look a bit like a nightdress.  I seem to have a bad habit of choosing fabrics that I love, like this one, rather than choosing the best fabric for the item I'm sewing.  I guess that is just a handicap of owning a fabric store - I get do easily sidetracked by our wonderful array of fabric.


Therefore, I am going to make it again right away. (only 5 hours, right?) This time I will use one of Kaffe Fassett's woven shot cottons, Roman Stripe in Blood Orange pictured above, bottom right.


In the next few weeks, they are releasing a pattern for some drawstring trousers, and you can bet I'll be ordering that pattern right away.


I love this motto of theirs, because it is exactly how we like to work at Picking Daisies.
If you can spare a couple of minutes, enjoy this video about their business.  It's marvelous, and you will see why I am so obsessed!

Watch Video Here

And finally, check out their website: www.merchantandmills.com