Free Projects & Tutorials

Tutorial: Creative Ways to Use Angelina Fiber

One of the many perks of being a textile artist is that you get to play with all sorts of fun and creative products, and Angelina Fiber is definitely one of those fun products. If you're not familiar with Angelina Fiber, it's a soft fiber that is light reflective as...

Silk carrier rods and how to use them to make silk paper

Silk carrier rods are curious little things but I love them because they have such an unexpected shape and texture and they can be adapted for use into fabric, mixed media art and felting in lots of different ways. Silk carrier rods are the by-product of reeling silk...

Tutorial: Creating texture on fabric using crinkled ribbon

I work a lot with textured fabric surfaces mostly because I think they look a lot more interesting than flat surfaces. Sometimes I create surface texture using machine stitching. And I also use a lot of fabric paper texture. I also sometimes like to use unusual...

Tutorial: Decorative Stitch “Art Lace” using water soluble stabilizer

I love to use the decorative machine stitches on my sewing machine and I use them in all sorts of different ways to achieve creative fabric embellishing effects. One of my favorite sewing techniques is combining water soluble stabilizer and the decorative stitches on...

Get Creative with Water Soluble Stabilizer

Don't you just love getting creative with fun products and techniques? Water soluble stabilizer is one of my very favorite products and I love to use it in lots of different ways to create interesting thread and fiber effects such as Soft edges on quilts Lace windows...

How to make simple and perfectly shaped fabric beads

Fabric beads ... mmmmmm .... Usually I like em kinda chunky like this ... ... but every now and then I need a bead that's perfect and plain like these. There are a number of ways to get a perfectly round fabric bead, but this tip is too good to keep to myself. My...

Exploring Photoshop: Designing Repeat Patterns

Designing your own fabric patterns has never been easier with all the amazing tools that we have at our disposal these days. And making a repeat pattern design is one of the most common ways to create designs. Although there are special programs that make this task...

Exploring Photoshop: How to make textured edges for your photos

This tutorial is presented using Photoshop Elements 9 which is similar to versions 10 and under. You can find an updated tutorial for the current version 14 here. Also, I use "Floating" documents so your workspace may look different. You can activate floating...

Free Machine Embroidery Tutorial – I Heart You

Machine needle-lace is a versatile technique and one I use often, particularly for making embellishments. But you can also use it for other applications and one of my favorites is "see-through" designs. This needle-lace heart design is a simple project that...

Exploring Photoshop: Removing backgrounds the easy way

One of the challenges I've always experienced when editing my product images, is removing the background. Depending on the technique you use to remove the main image from the background, sometimes it can end up looking like the dog had chewed around the edges of it....

Video Tutorial – How to make grunge monoprints using a gelatin plate

Love making painted grunge designs? Here's a quick video showing you how I made the grunge type backgrounds for my art journal, by making monoprints using a gelatin plate. You can read more about it here. PS - I've sped up the video otherwise it's like watching grass...

Exploring Photoshop: Blending Modes – Difference

If you've played with blending modes in Photoshop you no doubt have your favorites. My favorite blending modes are generally "overlay" and "soft light" because they seem to produce consistent results for the type of photo art I like to make. However this week I took a...