General Crafts

Marking Pen Quilts

Marking Pen Quilts

I have a great email question hit my inbox this morning and thought I would share my answer here.

“What brand of assorted color selection of permanent marking pens & fine point black permanent marking pens did you use.  I need pens that do not bleed on quilting cotton, specifically a black pen.  I am want to do a Dalmatian Puppy Quilt and need to permanently colour the black spots on to a white quilting cotton.”

Memory Quilt Project

A Memory Quilt is a fantastic way to record special events, special dates, and special loves that are important to you. They are easy, and quick to create using permanent marking pens!

Memory Quilts can become a project for your entire family or friends by holding a Quilting Party.  Make up the large white squares with the pattern and doodle fills completed.   Then put the squares out of your table with a pack of assorted fine point pens so that everyone can add their own drawings, signatures, or little sayings.  After the event, simply finish the quilt, memorializing the event.

marking pen quilt

My Memory Quilt came about because my son ask me what the name of one of our past cats was … “the one that was marmalade colored with three white paws?”  That started the ‘how many pets have we had in our 42 years of marriage’ naming contest that evening.  The list became so long that I finally had to write the names down so that we didn’t miss any of our beloved friends and didn’t start repeating names.

(While you may know me as a pyrographer and wood carver, my neighbors know me as ‘that cat lady!’   But I plead not guilty as a cat hoarder as all of our friends through all of our marriage have been spayed, neutered, and had their regular vetting and pet vaccinations!  Besides, the biggest pride I ever had at one time was 21, as we somehow ended up with three stray Mommas that wandered onto the back porch, which, of course, came pregnant!!!  And THAT wasn’t my fault.)

So, in answer to the email question, I personally use Sharpies!  They come in both fine point and wide point with a nice variety of colors.  The pens are very reasonably priced and available just about everywhere.

This marking pen quilt is a new creation for the Great Book of Floral Patterns that is in the process of being revised – and which sadly appears to be currently out of print from the publisher.

The quilt is worked on 12 1/2″ white cotton squares.  I printed my patterns, from our Wood Flowers Circle pattern pack, onto regular computer paper.

marking pen quilt

Next, I taped the printed pattern to my light box and over the pattern positioned my quilt square.  The quilt square was also taped to my light box using blue or green painter’s tape, which does not damage the seam allowance of the fabric.  When I turned on my light box, the pattern was extremely clear and visible through the fabric so that I could easily trace the outlines of the pattern with a fine point black Sharpie.

And … as I just wanted this quilt to a fun project I used some of my pyrography fill and texture patterns to fill in each area of my design with the same marking pen.  See our project, Pyrography Doodles, for fill ideas or you may want our Pyrography Doodles pattern package that has over 300 texture and fill patterns, plus 29 pattern designs.

If your white cotton fabric is thin or heavily starched you may have some slight bleeding.  Generally, that bleeding is some minimal that it is not really noticeable once the entire quilt is finished.

When I had all of the large quilt squares completed, I set the marking pen with a hot steam iron.  Next, I used my assorted color pack of fine point Sharpies to write the names of all of our furry friends over the years onto the blank areas of each square.  Since I know that we will have new friends join our family in the coming years, I have plenty of space to add their names too!

Next, I cut 2 1/2″ squares from a series of black and white fabric to become my small quilt squares.  Right now my quilt is waiting for the batting, backing, and free motion quilt stitching.

marking pen quilts

T-shirts are wonderful for marking pens too!  This is an extra-large, 100% cotton t-shirt that has been colored using fine point Sharpies.  The pattern comes from our Celtic Dragons pattern pack.

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Dried Art Gourd Bee Houses

Craft Art Gourd Bee Houses

Bee, Bug, and Seed Gourd House Roof Decorations

Begin this free, online dried craft gourd art project with our Basic Constructions step-by-step page.  Then enjoy how to create your roof accents on our Bee House Roof Accents page, and the Bee House Gallery page.

Free Craft Gourd Art Bird House Project

This project began as an experiment and practice piece in creating a large, roofed bird house gourd.  I wanted to work out how to add a wooden roof before I began the cutting steps on my large kettle gourd.  As I worked I became more and more delighted with the nest egg and small bottle gourd houses that I used as my practice pieces.  Adding a few dried, natural accents was logical next step to change them from just experiments into Bee, Bug, and Seed Houses that I could use for my fall decorations and in my autumn flower gardens.

Free Craft Gourd Art Bird House Project

Have fun creating your own gourd art, miniature bird houses for your garden, autumn wreaths, and Christmas presents.

Please share this link of FaceBook, Pinterest, and Reddit !!!!

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Bee Houses

Basic Construction of a Bee, Bug, or Seed Gourd House

Free Bee and Bug Gourd House ProjectAs summer slips into those first cool days of autumn, it is time for me to prepare my flower gardens for the winter months ahead.  The gourd bird houses that I made last spring need to be cleaned and checked for needed repairs, the fallen leaves needed to be raked and moved to the compose pile, and its time to harvest the flower seeds for next year’s plantings.

This year I am adding a new little project to my autumn list – Bee Houses!  My region has lost most of its honey bee and other insect populations because of the intensive use of pesticides and herbicides.  More and more I depend on our native wild bee population to pollinate my gardens.   There are several excellent articles on the net for creating wild bee homes, that offer other, fun ideas that you can do along with this Nest Egg Gourd Bee House project.

The original idea behind this project was to make a few simple, quick bee and bug houses that I could place throughout my garden as winter nests – miniature bird houses.  I wanted them to be as biodegradable, eco-friendly as possible, so I chose to use some of my thinner shelled, small craft gourds and dried plant materials from my yard for accents.

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If you enjoy our free, online projects and tutorials, please share this project with your friends and family on FaceBook, Pinterest, and Reddit!

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Gourd Bee Houses

DIY Bee and Bug Houses

One of my many autumn projects for the blog is a series of roosting houses for our winter birds made from dried craft gourds and decorated with pyrography and colored pencils.  Along the way to the creating these kettle gourd houses I wanted to first play around with ideas on making different roof styles.  Most DIY birdhouses use the stem area of the gourd for both hanging and as the roof area, but I wanted something different.

DIY craft gourd bird houses

So I picked up some smaller dried craft gourds off of Ebay.com – nest egg gourds, small bottle gourds, and some dipper gourds.  Next I got out my bench knife, my boxes of craft supplies, my dried flowers and grass, and began experimenting.

I never meant to use these practice pieces here on my blog, but they were so fun to create and have so many possibilities that I just had to share them with you.  One of the little delights, shown below, is made with a nest egg gourd, approx. 2 1/2″ high by 1 3/4″ wide, with a corn husk roof, grapevine twist and barberry seed accents.

DIY Egg Gourd Christmas Decorations

I was only going to make one or two to figure how the easiest method of adding a roof to a gourd.  I ended us with over a dozen in just a couple of day’s play.  As I experimented with several different roof material ideas I also came up with a multitude of uses for these small gourd houses.

DIY Mini Nest Egg Gourd Bird Houses

Some of these miniature gourd birdhouses will become Christmas ornaments, some are made to go out into my garden as bee and bug houses, one became a little garden scene shelf decoration.  But my favorite so far is my larger, 4″ x 5″, seed house that will be my sister’s Christmas present.  Inside of this gourd, before I added the roof, I added 3 Red Oak trees, 5 Tulip Poplar trees, 6 White Dogwood trees, 6 Chinese False Dogwood trees, 6 Golden Chain trees, a huge bunch of marigolds, and 12 nest egg gourds – all viable seeds from my Maryland garden to her new Colorado home!  (Shhh! – Please don’t tell her!!!  It’s a surprise!!!)

DIY Gourd Birdhouse Project

So join me this week as I share the steps with you for making your own DIY Bee-Bug-Seed Houses for your Christmas tree and autumn gardens.  Then at the beginning of October we will start the pyrography roosting gourd houses with a free Lora S. Irish pattern.

Let your friends on FaceBook, Twitter, and Pintrest know so they can share the fun.

Lora ~

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Color Chart for LSIrish.com

Mike A.,  Hooker green is equal to the phthalo green shown in the left column, second grouping.  A medium red-brown earthtone is equal to the venetian red, right column, third section!

Mike A. and his wood carving club are currently working as a group through our Canada Goose Relief Wood Carving Project – a great step-by-step project for any beginning wood carver.  He sent an email yesterday asking several questions on the paint colors used in this tutorial.  So, I am posting my favorite color chart guide here on our blog for Mike.

The chart is grouped into several areas for easy reference.

Left hand column, top shows the basic gray tones for neutral shading.  French gray tends towards a beige-gray or brown-gray coloring, and Paynes gray tends towards a glue-gray or gunmetal tone.  The second group shows the dark color tones used in colored pencil work for complimentary shading, where the compliment of the final color of an area is used to create the shadow tones.  The third section is my favorite graduated colorings for yellow.  The bottom group in the left hand column shows my skin tone colors.

In the right hand column, the top section shows my muted tone shading colors.  The remaining sections show my chosen graduated tones for pink, red, purple, blue, and green.

Every paint, pencil, and pastel company has their own unique names for their colors. I would recommend that you keep a copy of this painting guide on your computer.  You can print a copy, then write the manufacturer’s names of the paints you already own beside the matching color swatch.

To learn more about working with colors – hues, compliments, tones, and values – please visit our tutorial Who is R.G. Biv?  For working with watercolors for your pyrography projects, please see Watercolors and Wood Burning.  For more information on how to paint your wood carvings, you will want to take time reading our Painting Your Wood Carving tutorial.

Click on the color reference chart for a full-sized image.  Right hand click to save to your Desktop.

Lora Irish color chart

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