"Meet the Supplies" #4: Shrinky Dinks

When I first started planning my "Meet the Supplies" series, I was particularly excited to do a post about my collection of Shrinky Dinks.  Yes, they still make Shrinky Dinks!  And they are even cooler than I remember from when I was a kid! You can buy bulk packages of blank sheets, and at 50 sheets for 22 bucks, it's a fairly cheap art material especially since you can literally use every last scrap.

Okay, enough shameless shilling!  Once I was reintroduced to them, I found that Shrinky Dinks are a perfect mixed media quilting element for one important reason.  Oh, they're fantastic on a number of levels, but the thing that makes them IDEAL for attaching to quilts is that you can use a 1/8" hole punch to create holes which will shrink during the curing process to be just the right size for stitching the piece to a quilt by hand.  I imagine you could also use your machine to attach them using the same stitch you'd use to attach a button.

Sadly, I have actually been prevented from making new shrunken artwork for the past two years by the fact that the oven in my new apartment does not have a window in its door.  It's been super annoying, but fortunately I was able to make a whole lot of tiny beautiful objects before moving.  Here they all are!

Leaves traced from a book called "Kbach: A Study of Khmer Ornament," which I got for free and which has proven to be a wonderful visual resource when I'm trying to come up with patterns

I keep them in this box, which as room for SO MANY more!  Time to get a toaster oven just so I can shrink more art?

Teeny tiny stars.  These things are about 1/4" across

Here are a few of the stars that have already made it into a quilt.

Shield designs in various shades of blue and purple

More leaves traced from the Khmer Ornament book.  These were outlined in silver, which didn't look quite as nice once it shrunk - turns out silver pen can lose its sheen in the oven.

Star buttons

Little petals or leaves - I haven't figured out yet what to use these for.

Fun pastel buttons with red leafy designs in red Sharpie

This is an example of the cool effects you can get when you use a pair of decorative scissors to cut out your Shrinky Dinks before shrinking them.

Bold buttons in red and yellow

Some striped Shrinky Dink buttons in a quilt, arranged to form six-pointed stars

Two of the Khmer leaf designs ended up in my SAQA donation quilt.

And, the best thing in my collection, MONSTERS!  I spent an enjoyable several evenings while visiting my parents drawing all kinds of little monsters.

So Many Monsters!

MORE Monsters!

"Meet the Supplies" #3: Surprise Sequins!

For the third post in my "Meet the Supplies" series, a surprise pile of sparkly bits provided by one of my coworkers!

She had acquired a ton of the little baggies of beads and sequins that arrive with fancy Chanel dresses in case the garments require any fixes or alterations once they get to the store, and asked me if I had any use for them.  Of course I said yes!

So many little baggies full of things just waiting to be sorted!

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to take piles of tiny sparkly objects and spend some quality time sorting and organizing them. Here's the exciting stash that emerged from the pile:

colorful pearls, strings of black sequins, and some weird sparkly yarn that looks like miniaturized tinsel.  That'll be fun to play with!

So many different kinds of sequins!

The best parts of this sparkly score are the little gear-shaped sequins and the totally unexpected pile of Swarovski crystals on the bottom right.

"Meet the Supplies" #2: Buttons

The second featured item in my "Meet the Supplies" series is Buttons!  I have always loved buttons, and in fact, perhaps some day I'll visit the Waterbury Button Museum in Connecticut and write a post about their collection, which I assume is quite impressive.

My own button collection is actually pretty modest compared with some of my other supplies, and it turns out as I discovered when I got them out to take photos, the collection desperately needed to get organized!

Basically just a sandwich bag packed full of random buttons.  Not remotely helpful when you need to find something specific!

I dumped all the buttons out on the table and started coming up with (hopefully sensible) ideas about organizational strategies. I knew I didn't want just a mass of resealable bags to dig through, so I decided to get creative. 

Similar buttons can be tied together with string, but this risks tangling, and can be super inconvenient if you're forced to always be tying and untying knots. 

Safety pins work perfectly and are very secure, but they aren't capable of holding that many buttons, and definitely not ones with a wide diameter. 

 

I remembered that I own a bunch of closeable hoops that are meant for use in jewelry making, and they can hold more buttons than the safety pins. 

I ended up combining the plastic baggie, tie-with-string, safety pin, earring thingy and little clear box methods to get my buttons into some decent semblance of order.

Massive number of purple buttons, which I must have bought or been given as a sampler pack, and "misc" mostly unique buttons, many of which have been found on the streets if New York. 

Flower shaped, clear, black, mother of pearl, and finally teeny tiny buttons for dolls' shirts.

Various shirt buttons always seem to find their way to me.

I spent a couple of hours at a fabulous store on Broadway carefully separating these clear and shell buttons from a miscellaneous collection piled in a massive container the size of an oil drum.  The clear ones especially continually prove useful!

"Meet the Supplies" #1: SCISSORS!

I am an artist living in a New York apartment, and I own A LOT of art supplies.  I've had to choose art supplies over a lot of other things a normal person might own, such as nice clothing or any decent number of books.  Given how important they are to me, and the percentage of the available space in our place that is filled with them, I thought my giant collection of supplies might deserve a series of posts profiling what makes them great, where I got them, and why I keep them around.  First up, one of the most important tools any artist or craftsperson could ever own, SCISSORS.  

I once saw a comedian on TV who had a bit about how to survive being married to a crafter.  I don't remember most of the jokes, but I definitely recall that his Rule #1 was "Never touch her scissors." Seems to me this was not a bad piece of advice!

Normal scissors live in a giant mug. Gimmicky fancy-edge scissors live with my collection of decorative punches - those will get their own post sometime soon!

I have a bit of what one might call a "scissors problem." I really hate to part with a pair once it's in my life:

The (nearly) whole collection.  These are the scissors that stay at home with me.

And here are the ones that help me out at work, where they have the glamorous job of being used to make costumes for Broadway shows. 

I'm not even totally sure where I got some of these scissors, I've had them for so long!

The three little silly decorative paper edgers are surprisingly useful, and I hope to feature some of the fun things a quilter can do with them in a future post, even though, very disappointingly, they are completely and totally unable to cut fabric. 

The pair of Fiskars with my name on them I've had for so long and abused so badly (in high school they suffered through years of being forced to cut through Formica tile samples!) that now they're basically reduced to cutting wire and things that get them all gross and gummy.  But I still love them!

The totally weird looking ones on the left side of the work-scissors photo are used to trim away fabric edges when doing machine applique.  On the bottom right are my pinking shears.

The three pairs on the bottom are really the stars of my collection.

Three of my beautiful, solid Ginghers.

I suggest to anyone who has a little extra cash and wants to own a pair of scissors that will bring you joy, grab some Ginghers.
The pair on the top are pointed, knife-edged, and perfect for making small, intricate and clean cuts in either paper or fabric.
The middle pair are spring-loaded in order to reduce stress on the hands while cutting, plus they come with a fabulous steampunk style metal closure to keep them from attacking folks.
The bottom pair are specifically designed to give you extra leverage, so you can cut through tons of heavy layers super easily.  They may be the most fun to use scissors that I own, and they really shine when I use them to cut away all the excess layers of fabric, batting and laminate from the edge of a quilt after I've machined on the binding.

I have friends who laugh at the vastness of my scissors collection, and they're probably totally right, but I just laugh at them right back for owning only a single pair that aren't even sharp!