Pink Artist Squares and Porcupine Beads.

Here are my Pink Artist's Squares all done and ready to be sent off to MONICA fro the Pink Artist Art Doll Collaboration.

(You have probably noticed this button in my sidebar.) Artists from all over the world are sending Monica two inch square pieces of art that have fabric backings. Monica will then sew all of the squares onto an Art Doll and the Doll will be auctioned off to raise money for Breast Cancer Research. Monica has a wonderful blog called THread Girl Gone Wild and you can find a link to it in the blog list to the right!!

I made both of these tiny collages using needle felting and beading techniques. For the purple heart I felted thru a piece of the red and pink lace that I showed on an earlier post- the lace that I painted. For the Pink Heart, I used a piece of a fulled wool sweater for the background. I am really happy about how these turned out. Also if you go to Monica's blog, you can see all of the squares as they arrive for her to work on. She has gotten some beauties already but the deadline is not till the 1st of March! Hard to believe that I am an entire month early!! WOOOO HOOOOO!!

Now on to Porcupine Beads.

This is also an idea that I got from the wonderful Monica!!! As most of us never throw away our scraps of fabrics, as we may NEED them for some cool project some day-Here is a fun project ot add to the What Do I do With All of My Scraps list!!! Cut them into smallist pieces if they arent smal already and be sure to include some scraps that really ravel.

Throw the wad of scraps into the washing machine- I put mine in a net bag and include it in with another load of laundry. then dry the scrap bag along with everything else. The result will be a tangled mess of color and fibers. Then you tear or cut- if you must- off a small wad and roll it up into a ball. With a neddle and thread stitch throught the ball of scraps a few times and then with each stitch add a bead. In this manner yo uwill come up with some wonderful, totally unique beads to embellish all sorts of fun projects!! Some of them turn out looking like Porcupines because they have fibers sticking out all over! My 16 year old son said that they looked like Mines that were used during the second world war during the sea battles. That 's a 16 year old history nut for you!! What ever!!! I think that they are really cool and they are wonderful fun to have to work on when you want to do someting with your hands but don't know what you want to do!! I think that I might even make a necklace out of some of them!!

Thanks Monica for this wonderful technique! Fun, Unique, Funky and Fabulous!!! What could be better!!!