C&T Publishing is a group of quilters and crafters dedicated to publishing products tailored to our audience. This blog is where we break away from book schedules and marketing campaigns to focus on what drives us to be creative and how this creativity manifests itself in our every day lives.
Happy Halloween Miss Kitty
My 6 year old, Alivia, came home from school recently and informed me that her best friend, Minae, is going to be a witch for Halloween and she will be her cat. Finally! I thought, This is the costume-making opportunity I’ve been waiting for!
I sewed the skirt with tail, ears, and fur wristbands. At C&T Publishing, most moms and grandmas make the kids their costumes. Until now, I’d always just taken the easy route and bought the kids (Continue Reading...)
Quilt Trails
One of our editors, Liz Aneloski, forwarded a link to the Quilt Trails website to the CT Staff. I enjoyed it so much I thought I’d share it with you all.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, sits picturesque Yancey County, full of old tobacco barns and winding trout streams, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Here you’ll find a completely different summer quilt experience, part of a barn-quilt movement that has swept across much of the country in recent (Continue Reading...)
Author Design Tip: Katie Pasquini Masopust
As a designer, reading about design in relation to quilting is interesting. I recently picked up Katie Pasquini Masopust’s book, Design Explorations for the Creative Quilter. There were a lot of great ideas for creative inspiration, composition and color themes. I found a technique that I learned in photography but used in a different way for quilting. I thought this was so cool.
These are her basic instructions: Start with a photo of a landscape, animals, buildings, plants. Use an empty (Continue Reading...)
Author Design Tip: Lorraine Torrence and Jean B. Mills
Today I was looking at Fearless Design for Every Quilter by Lorraine Torrence and Jean B. Mills. This is a book that you’ll want to read cover to cover. This book teaches you how to improve your work by sharing insights in critique groups. Critiquing can be difficult both for the person critiquing and for the person receiving the feedback. The way the authors teach you about creativity and critiquing makes interesting reading. The authors set up 10 exercises or (Continue Reading...)
Super Hero Party
You saw the invitations in my previous post. Now for the fun part, the party.
Every super hero needs a cape and mask to hide their identity so I made one for each super hero.
The masks are a simple oval shape with slits for the eyes. I used a black satiny fabric for the front, fast2fuse for the middle and a gold velvety fabric for the backing. I used stretchy black elastic for the strap. I just sewed around the outside (Continue Reading...)
Super Hero invitations
My son just turned 3. These are the invites I made for his party. They were the easiest I’ve made yet, and I think they are my favorites. I just laid out the invitation cover, saved it as a HiRes JPG photo size 4 x 6 and had them printed at Walgreens as photos for $0.19 a print. I then glued a black and white print of the invitation details on the back. How simple and inexpensive is that?
The more (Continue Reading...)
Sock Puppet Fun
Get out your scraps of fabric, felt, yarn leftovers, sequence, buttons and any other fun accessories.
We used socks, felt, yarn, googly eyes, fabric, beads, chenille sticks and adhered with fabritac.
The cape for Super Hudson is just a piece of felt turned over a piece of yarn and glued down. The mask is a rectangle piece of felt with a piece of chenille stick wrapped around a googly eye.
The hair for both puppets was made in the same way. Tie a piece (Continue Reading...)
Craftivites at Chevy’s
On a Friday night a while back, we went out to Chevy’ s for dinner. It was the perfect night to sit outside, and I know they have a big patio area. I reminded my 5 year old that she had been there once before on a school field trip. Being a 5 year old, she says, “You mean the place that only has tortillas to eat?” I explained to her that we were just doing a restaurant tour with (Continue Reading...)
Spring Baskets
I donated 33 petal pots to my daughter’s kindergarten class. The teacher and I thought they would make perfect spring baskets to hold the eggs that the class will be dyeing.
I painted the pots 6 different spring colors, using only 3 acrylic paint colors and lots of white (red, blue and yellow). I used a Japanese screw punch to place a hole on 2 of the sides for the handle.
I then used artist’s tape on the inside to hold down the (Continue Reading...)
Tea Party—Invitations
My Toddler is now a young girl; she just turned 6 years old. Alivia wanted to have a tea party for her birthday so I found a cute little bistro, New Englund’s Bistro and Tea Room in here in Concord, CA. The tea party started off with a presentation about tea etiquette and what a “lump of sugar” is. The girls enjoyed tea, lemonade, finger sandwiches, cupcakes, a story about a tea party and feeling all grown up in their pretty (Continue Reading...)
