Duncan Johnson

Artist, Duncan Johnson, collects salvage wood from nearby his home in Vermont to make these lovely sculptures. Or should I call them paintings or quilts. I'm not sure. His art transcends many mediums and reminds me of traditional quilt making. Using scraps of whatever you have around to make something beautiful.



It reminds me of an idea I was exploring a while back with fused plastic quilt like pieces.


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Black Friday 3 Day Art Event at Tribute Gallery

Get on over to Tribute Gallery Black Friday Weekend and support independent artists!

I am very excited to announce that Diskgrunt and I, are having our first ever handmade Popup Show at The Tribute Gallery for 3 days of handmade arts, crafts, apparel, comics, bags and more the weekend of Nov. 27-29th.

So heres the scoop. We will be having Free demos every day at 2pm

Friday @ 2pm I will be teaching the basics of how to make fused plastic, a versitile material that can be used for a variety of projects.

Saturday @ 2pm Diskgrunt will be teaching how to prepare your artwork for silkscreening.

Sunday @ 2pm Diskgrunt will show how to coat and expose a screen. This is great if you are a newbie to silkscreening.

New items in the Shop!

Check it out here.

This puffy little birdy is too cute. I wanted to experiment with combining embroidery, fused plastic, and other paper scraps into one piece. I really like the three dimensionality of it.



As you can see I've been super obsessed with triangles lately. I just can't get enough of them. My other breakthrough is that I can use fused plastic for more than just bags. It looks great stretched on canvas stretchers.

Experimental Embroidery and Stitching

My latest obsession is all things embroidery. I'm doing some experimenting with mixing fabric, fused plastic, and stitching. The results are turning out pretty cool. Here's a few examples of stuff I've made so far. 

This is a process photo. I ended up sewing all of the triangles down to reveal only a couple areas of the underneath fabric. 
This is how it looks to embroidery on the fused plastic. It actually works quite well. 
The next two images are some of Claire Coles work. I think these bird brooches are gorgeous and they are made out of upcycled wallpaper scraps. Very cool.
I love how the embroidery on porcelain turned out. I only wonder how the artist made holes without busting the porcelain. I bet it was all done before firing the pieces?? If anyone knows more about this process, let me know!
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Get Out Da Way!

I recently made this really cute padded camera pouch for one of my etsy customers. I really like the way it turned out so I wanted to share it with you. I applied the same padding method that I use for my laptop bags for the camera pouch. I basically made several horizontal pockets that are stuffed with plastic remnants. The inside is lined with upcycled tee-shirt.

Sorry of the lack of posts lately, all of my energy has been focused on another project that I will talk about soon!

Fused Plastic Fabric

A big part of my process is making sheets of fused plastic which essentially becomes the fabric for my bags. It is really cool to see what I get out of the bags. Happy mistakes happen often. On the flip side, this process can be time consuming and tiresome. This afternoon I made a big batch of plastic fabric. In fact, I think this is the biggest batch I've ever made. I had a revelation about how to streamline the fusing process.

Not all bags are created alike. When you try to pair two different bags together one shrinks and fuses differently than the other. This creates unpleasant buckles to work with. So I started to only fuse the same bag to itself. Also, I've found out that you don't have to cut the bag handles and sides. It works fine to just fold one bag into thirds, tucking the handles inside of itself. It creates smaller pieces as you can see in the picture with the Fred Myer bags. These will be great to do a patchwork kind of thing.

The results are beautiful! I can't wait to start making stuff.

Fused Plastic Wristlet

I've been wanting to make a wristlet for awhile now. I made it so it fits the essentials (wallet, keys, phone, digital camera). It is working beautifully. This is the first project that I have put in a zipper by myself. I'm not sure if i did it right, but it seems to be working fine. Hooray! I will try to make some for the etsy shop soon.

DIY laptop bag

This past weekend I made a bag to hold my computer. I thought I would share some of my process. I basically created a huge rectangle out of fused plastic with all the graphics I wanted on one side. Then I attached a panel from an old teeshirt on the back. Then I sewed horizontal lines that create the pockets for the padding. The padding is made up of wadded up plastic bags. Next, turn everything inside out and stitch the sides together. And Wha-la. A super cool eco friend laptop bag. Woot!