Hey,

I'm a Guest Blogger at Quilting Gallery's Blog.

http://quiltinggallery.com/2009/02/01/bonnie-mccaffery/

If you ever wanted to hear more about my quilting career and see a sampling of some of my quilts, here's the place to see it.

Enjoy,

Bonnie

Portrait Quilts BOOK Reprint

I am SOOOOO excited to announce that we have finally reprinted the "Portrait Quilts: Painted Faces You Can Do" BOOK. It has been out of print for quite some time and I have heard from so many people that they would have loved to have owned the book. And so we spent the money and reprinted the book. http://BonnieMcCaffery.com

If you have ever wanted to learn to paint a face on fabric, this is the book for you. It shows you step by step how to paint each of the features. EVEN A BEGINNER CAN DO THIS. The secret is a tracing of a photograph under the fabric so you can see exactly where to paint each of the features.

If you're a visual kind of person and need to see the painting in action, we also have the "Painted Face for Beginners" DVD.

I would love to see photos of faces you've done using this technique.

A New Portrait

I'm home for a nice long stretch of time - which is very refreshing. Being on the road all the time does not leave time for any creativity, so 10 weeks home is a good thing.

I had a chance to play and felt like painting a portrait from a photo I took of my daughter. It's a gorgeous photo. I decided to flip her the other direction and use a different head shot, but I absolutely love the painted draping.

I'm not sure about the background or the hair yet, but I'll play another day. Just in case you wanted to trying painting a face, you can check out my "Painted Face for Beginners" DVD (yes BEGINNERS can do this) on my website.

Alternative Creativity - Painting a Bernina

Life presents you with some very interesting creativity opportunities sometimes. I was presented with one of these opportunities very recently - I had the opportunity to decorate a Bernina sewing machine to be auctioned off.

This sounded like too much fun to pass up. I didn't really have time, but this was really something that sounded like it could be a lot of fun - and I don't get to have much creative fun lately, so I jumped at the opportunity. Bernina offered this opportunity to 12 designers (and I am so honored to be one of the chosen). I know Laura Cater-Woods and Robbi Joy Eklow are 2 of the other designers.

I knew I wanted to paint it with some DigiBobbE styled designs and I didn't want the base coat to be white. I used a plastic paint as the base and then added a automotive metallic blue paint. My husband took the whole machine apart so it would be clean and neat.

I sketched the DigiBobbE style designs with chalk and then painted it with Testors paint - it took at least 2 coats. Way cool! Added some rhinestones and then according to the Bernina guidelines it needed to have something sewing related - so I made some machine embroidered butterflies on tulle with Tintzl between the layers, cut them out, and added them to the gold painted wire curls.

This machine still works. I think the lucky winner of this machine will be thrilled to have a beautiful piece of art that also works as a sewing machine. If you want to bid on this machine, you'll probably have to go through a Bernina dealer that is going to BU (Bernina University).

So you see, life may present other opportunities for creativity other than fabric. Do what you love!

Bonnie Lyn McCaffery http://BonnieMcCaffery.com

Play Day

I'm finally home long enough to have a day off - and I decided to turn it into a play day. I was inspired by Laura Dunn's work http://www.lauragunnstudio.blogspot.com/ and an article I saw in Quilting Arts magazine about Linda and Laura Kemshall http://www.lindakemshall.com/linda_kemshall_laura.htm. I LOVE Laura Kemshalls piece in the magazine (I don't think it's on her website yet).

So I got out my paints (DecoArt SoSoft Fabric Paints - reg., neon, shimmers, & metallics) and some creative tools - a dead hotel room key, toothpicks, plastic baggie, rubber stamp texture cube, some fun rubber stamps, and Cindy Walter's Stabilized Fabric - and began my play. I loved using the Stabilized Fabric. It was a great day! Here are the 3 pieces I painted.