Small Additions

     While sketching out and thinking about new quilts, I've been working on small crafts. One of the things lurking about the studio are jars containing thread snippets that are too lovely to throw away. Also fabric snippets and selvedges. I hope someday to think of a use for them. Maybe I can coerce my art group to come up with a challenge to use up such odds and ends in a quilt. But that would mean that I'd have to come up with a creative quilt using them and I've been avoiding that. In the meantime, I've decided to use them for a decoration. The jars I've been storing them in are plastic and have orange lids. Orange just doesn't fit in with the colors in my studio. So to fix that, I gathered fabric bits that I had monoprinted, sheer fabric, matte medium, an old sponge brush,  paint, and scissors.

jar with thread snippets

     I cut pieces of fabrics, and sponged them on with matte medium.

lid in process drying

When it was dry, I painted on Lumiere paint along the lines of the intersections of the fabrics. When that was dry, I cut a circle of sheer fabric and sponged that on top to smooth it all down with matte medium.

finished jars sitting on their shelf

The jars seemed to need a little more so I topped them off with Little Treasures I had made before. These were featured in Quilting Arts Magazine, Winter, 2005 by Carol Fletcher.

a Little Treasure

And here they are adding some style to my studio and giving me an excuse not to dig in and use them up.

All topped off

Until Opus, my cat, finds them and knocks their tops off. Have any of you created anything wonderful with loose thread bits? I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please leave comments to let the artists know you stopped by.