Cherry Blossom Bow Ties

For those of you who don't know, my favorite crafty pastime is making bow ties.  I've made so many different ones, and I've learned so many different dying techniques in the process.  I've learned how to dip dye, ombré, and tie dye.

A watermelon I'm quite fond of.

Tie dyed Mardi Gras puppy bow tie

I was thinking of things that I haven't tried yet, and I realized I haven't done much in the way of painting.  Inspired by the impending springtime, I thought I'd try my hand at painting some cherry blossoms.

I soaked a solid white tie in water to help the dye absorb better.

The first thing to do was to prepare a background.  I figured a nice light blue for the sky would be a good effect.  I ombréd the blue the same way I usually do.  First, I added a little bit of water to my little plastic tub and got a solid white bow tie nice and soaked.  Then, I took the tie out, and added a kettle full of boiling hot water.  I eyeballed roughly a half cup of salt, which nicely dissolved immediately.  I ended up adding 3 teaspoons of Aquamarine Rit Dye.

Note the vinyl gloves.  Learn from your mistakes, kids.  Especially when you have to keep your nails painted for four solid months because you accidentally dyed them purple while making tights.

I don't usually worry about the neck strap too much when I dye because it ends up being hidden under the shirt collar anyway.  I accidentally got some drops of concentrated dye on the tie, so I just decided that would be the darker side.  I didn't let the dye sit too long, since I wanted a nice light blue.  The color always turns out a little bit lighter once it dries, so I pulled it out when it was just slightly darker than what I wanted.

Fresh out the dye bath.

After rinsing in my bathroom sink, the dorm gods smiled down upon me and graced me with an available washing machine.  I live in a building made to house 150+ people, and there are only 4 washers.  One of them is currently broken.  This building was not planned particularly well.

Freshly washed, hanging out to dry.

Once it dried, it ended up fading to a beautiful light blue color.  It's always tricky figuring out exactly how long to leave the dye to set, especially when it dries so drastically different from the wet color.  I guess I just got lucky this time.

Perfect sky background color.

Next came the actual painting.  I have never done this before, so I figured a few practice branches and flowers on a test scrap of fabric would probably be a good idea.  Once I painted, I realized that since I was using so little paint on the fabric itself, I didn't worry about it bleeding through.  Even if it did, I could cover it up with an identical stroke on either side.

I decided on larger branches with dots instead of individual petals.

The best part about nature is that it rarely follows a straight line.  As a result, I could pretty much take the branches in any direction I wanted.

Branches that look like veins ready for petals.

On the test strip, I realized I like the look of red layered under pink petals, so I scattered dots along the branches in red first, then pink.  I added a few blowing in the wind, as well.

Ready for pink.

I'm not going for anything too terribly realistic, so there are a lot of petals floating around in space.  At first, I was reluctant to add the pink, since the red looked so good on its own.  Once I did though, I was quite pleased with the result.

The final product.

Hopefully within the next few days, the rain will subside enough to go outside and, with my lovely model Casey, take a few pictures in the sunlight so the colors will show up better.  He doesn't know about this yet, so that'll be fun.  It doesn't rain often in Florida, but when it does, it rains nonstop for 4 days.  At least it hasn't been colder than 61 degrees this week.

Check back eventually for updates with better pictures!  I'm not sure why I was so shaky this time around.

Winter Break Crafting

Probably my favorite thing about college is that the summer and winter breaks really are breaks.  There aren't any assignments given, there's no extra reading that I have to do, and I finally get to sit back and do things that I want to do.  And, since it's me, I made things.

When I was little, my mother made little wooden tiles that helped us young'ns to learn to read.  She made tiles with different words, settings, and actions on them.  What made them special though, was how she also made tiles with a lot of family members' faces on them.  A few years ago, I noticed that with my cousins now having children of their own, the size of the family had almost doubled.  The younger bunch had found the old tiles and had a grand old time making their older cousins do silly things.  I found a bag of the leftover tiles, and made another batch, adding in those who had been born since the first set was made.  I consider myself very lucky to have such a large and ever-growing family, so this Christmas, I decided it was time for yet another batch of tiles.

Using one of the originals as a size reference for the heads

I added a lot of different settings and verbs in the last group, so this time, I mainly focused on making tiles for all the new babies that had been born since then.  I decided to go for a New Orleans theme this time around.

The finished tiles

I'm really proud of my crawfish.

In the background, you can see Christmas presents in the works for the rest of the family.  I decorated glass ornaments with oil based felt pens.  The red one is a Sharpie brand, but I used another brand for the other colors since a pack of those is about the same cost as one Sharpie.

Six out of 25 that I made.

The reason I had those oil based paint pens in the first place is, you guessed it, to make Sharpie mugs.  My mother is the type of person that no one ever knows what to get for her.  She really doesn't ask for much more than a nice quiet afternoon nap, Netflix, and a large glass of iced tea.  I couldn't think of anything to get for her for Christmas.  Luckily for me, she cleaned out our pantry and found a large pack of assorted hot chocolate mixes.  She started drinking those every night, which gave me the idea for the mugs.

Dollar Store mugs.

I'm not going to go into detail as to how I made these, since they're all over the internet right now.

 The one with the fleur-de-lis was mainly a test one so that I could get the feel of the markers on the ceramics, but she uses that one the most.

When I was at Michaels to get the oil based paint pens, I noticed a pack of canvases for a very good price.  Being as weak as I am, I bought a pack.  My boyfriend had mentioned something about wanting more art for his wall, so I thought about making a series of canvases that resembled the surface of the planets.  The pack only had 5 canvases, so I decided to do galaxies instead.

Sketching the nebula

I based it off of this nebula.

Almost finished

In retrospect, acrylics would probably have been a better choice than watercolors, but hey, I like how it turned out.  I used an iridescent color in the center which doesn't show up too well on camera, but it looks much better in person.  I still need to put the other stars in the background.

And that's about it.  In the meantime, I have a show to direct.