Painting Faces

I never would have thought I'd enjoy painting faces so much. At our old church, we somehow started doing face painting for festivals that we'd participate in. After getting over my initial fear that I'd ruin kids faces forever, it actually was quite enjoyable to throw paint onto kids faces. I think I learned that kids really don't care what it looks like, they just want paint on their face.

After a year of not face painting, I pulled out the paints for a Fourth of July party at our new church. This was probably my favorite creation from the night. It's supposed to be a frog.

Hot Cross Quilt

So I took a break from the larger quilt I'm working on (mainly because I ran out of fabric and didn't have enough money in my budget to get more fabric this month) and finished a smaller quilt that I had been wanting to try for a while.

This is a 30 inch square quilt and I really liked how intentionally scrappy it looks. I also love the way the blues and whites played off each other.

The pattern is called "Hot Cross Schnibbles Charm Pack" and is intended to be used with what's called Charm Packs (prepackaged 5inch fabric squares). I couldn't find any charm packs I liked so I just collected a bunch of blue and white fabric and cut them into 5 inch squares which are the size of the squares in the charm packs and used those.

I loved how fast this quilt came together and I'll probably keep this pattern around for a while.

The other fun part was I ran across an easy way to do quilt binding. It was so much easier than what I had been doing and it looks much nicer. You can find the instructions on how to do this easy binding here: http://heatherbailey.typepad.com/photos/continuous_quiltbinding

Quilt Experiment

One of the goals I have for this year is to complete projects that have been sitting around in my closet. This is one such project.

I began this quilt about two years ago after being inspired by some fabric I found (the outlining multi-color squares in the middle). This ended up being a 5' x 4' size quilt and everything from cotton, to silk, to wool was used in making this quilt.

I didn't really have an overall plan for the quilt nor did I have a pattern. Having no pattern proved harder than I thought. At almost every stage I ended up spending hours staring at the quilt thinking, "what's next"? I also found it harder to actually create what I was seeing in my head.

Moral of the story: I don't think I'll ever not work off a pattern again. Or at least, I think I'll wait for a year or two before trying that again.

But it's finally done and I think I'm happy with the overall result. If anything, I'm super excited about how the colors worked together and that I got my corners so straight.

face painting

Well, it's official. We have now successfully accomplished our first "outreach" event with our church. We spent the day painting kid's faces at a local block party. To be honest, I've never had so much fun in my life.

I think the more surprising thing for me was realizing how much the kids enjoyed getting their faces painted...even if it was a terrible job. It makes me wonder if part of the draw of face painting is 1) you get the undivided attention of someone or 2) when all is said and done, you are different or unique. I haven't decided which is more the case, but it was a really fun event. I highly recommend giving it a try.