Geek Speak Blog

I've started a new series of items: Decorative Stitched Min Landscapes.   I had taken an AQC iQuilt on-line class about a year ago and really enjoyed it.

This is the first tree that I made.  The color really pops!

More Sea Turtles are coming!

The idea to do sea turtles first came to me while I was preparing to design something for my quilt guild, The Cotton Patch Quilters.   I knew that I wanted to go acrylic, but it took a few weeks to finale the idea on a Caribbean waters theme.  

We went to DragonCon over Labor Day Weekend.   There was major overload!   It was estimated that 85,000 people attended the Science Fiction and Fantasy convention in downtown Atlanta.

I had a number of firsts this year.

I decided to enter something in my guild's quilt show.  I've been in the guild close to 6 years and was never interested in creating something for the show, but after stumbling across the quilted acrylic canvases, I decided I had finally found something I wanted to submit.

I took the watercolor painted applique last year and wanted to take it up several notches.  I had only been dabbling with it.  Meanwhile, I had been holding onto 3 canvases that I had dubbed Caribbean Waters.  The two techniques suddenly collided. 

Thank you for taking an interest in my quilted acrylic artwork!

I've created this page to give you a better understanding about the process that I use to create my quilted acrylic painted wall hangings.

It starts with the lightest weight cotton canvas and each canvas starts out around 28" x 30".  These are cut from a very large spool of canvas- about 6 feet tall!

The original version of this article was lost when I upgraded my website software, so I decided to rewrite it! I  think it's much better now.

There's a bottom line to this article: There are a several factors and perceptions at work that make it difficult to price handcrafted items.

I see it as an intersection between the art you are making and the person who could buy it.

Forewarning!  This article is kind of dry!

I will go over most of the associated costs to give you a better idea of what it takes to create my quilted acrylic painted canvas artwork.

There was a very large amount of startup cost involved with this undertaking, because I had never tried anything this complex, before. 

I described the acrylic painted canvases that I've been working on over the last several months in a previous blog post.

Several friends have had trouble visualizing what the finished projects would look like.  At least one person was horrified that I chopped the canvases into pieces, even after explaining that they were not the finished project!

These quilted mixed media projects require a great deal of preparation and it can take up to a week of daily work.

I was already shopping at Dick Blick Art Supplies.  They have a great selection of everything, including bulk raw 7 oz canvas (online only) at a really affordable price.

As for acrylic paint, I went with Blick.  They have value, student and professional grade acrylic paints.   I chose the value paint.