WiseArts

First, I received these sweet old gummed Eureka Seals from my mom as a Valentine’s gift.

They are not dated, but I would place them in the late 50’s or 60’s. The Birthday Seals being the oldest… back when gay meant happy, festive, jolly. Inside the front cover it says “USE Gay, Colorful Eureka Seals…”.

Next up, I found this bunch of humorous linen embroidery kits for 75 cents each. We have: Next week we’ve got to get organized, Plan Ahead, Home Sweet Home, No Job Is Finished Until The Paperwork Is Done, and Don’t Worry About Your Station In Life - There Is Always Someone To Tell You Where To Get Off.

They each include the pre-printed design on linen, instructions and embroidery floss.

Finally, this fanciful red stuffed lion. Maybe from the 60’s? It’s about 6.5″ tall. There’s a little cloth tag that says it’s made in Japan. It is very well stuffed, not squishy at all. This cost me $5, but I’ve never seen one like it and it was so cute and retro, I decided it was worth that.

This evening I took part one of a class on textile surface design. One of the projects we worked on was marbling fabric using shaving cream and acrylic paint! It was fun. My friend Isolde took the class too. Hope she’ll post hers!

To make these, we spread cheap shaving cream on a plastic bag (surface protectant), dripped thin acrylic paint on the cream, and then swirled it around using various implements (fork, chopstick, spatula…). Then we took a piece of cotton muslin and patted it down over the whole mess. Left it to soak/set for about 5 minutes, then peeled it off and rinsed it under running water. I liked making swirl patterns! These aren’t quite dry yet.

I think I’ll do some cool random stitchery over these later on…

Cross-posted at Thing-a-day

Due to my Superbowl party yesterday, I slacked off on the first day of Thing-a-day, but I made two things today to make up for it!

Thing 1: A crystal ball made from seed beads and Swarovski crystal beads (4mm size). I’ll probably make another one of these on another day, so I can make a pair of earrings.

Thing 2: My husband is off on a business trip for a few days and I miss him a helluva lot. He’s a hardcore retro gamer, so I thought I’d do a little pixely cross stitchery in his honor.

Itsa me Mario! With fire power!

Cross posted at Thing-a-day