Since Neptune got the most love I am giving back some o’ that sweet lovin’ with extra prizes. I hope y’all realize that I am just cleaning out my drawers here (not my underwear you dirty little vixens and what ever the male word for vixen would be) my fabric drawers. I am getting ready to embark on a whole new period of the Tula Pink empire, insert wink and sly smile here. But I digress, let’s get down to business.

So the winner(S) are…

!    !    !    A      N      D    !    !    !

Congrats to Jennifer Rossi for the Jellyroll and our Charm Pack winners Tricia and Emily. Give ‘em some love. You know the drill, send me your mailing addresses and I will do my part to get the fabric in your greedy little hands ASAP!

Wow, this is crazy! I never thought this give away would be so huge. Big hugs, kiss kiss to all y’all. Thank you for feeding my ever-growing sense of self entitlement. Since this has exceeded my expectations, of which I had few, I feel that it is only fair to give more stuff away. 1200-ish people divided by only 6 prizes seems like crappy odds to me. So here is the second winner this week! Why not, right? You get my whole Plume pattern collection. There are five of them because five is a super good number.

Email your address to me so I can mail some free stuff to YOU.

jenny at tulapink dot com

or direct message me at:

twitter.com/tulapink

I promised a give away on twitter and I do my best to deliver so here it is. The BIGGEST give away in Tula Pink history, and that’s exactly what it is, the history of Tula Pink!Over the next six weeks I will give away a little piece of me every Friday, in the form of Jellyrolls. I have one JR of every collection I have ever done for Moda Fabrics and they are now up for grabs.

What do I have to do to win these fabulous prizes? you may be asking yourself this very question. All I want to know is what your favorite Tula Pink fabric collection was. Could it be Plume my most recent concoction or are you old school, Full Moon Forest maybe? or Flutterby? Neptune? Nest? Hushabye? They are all my babies so it has no bearing on who wins but still, for my own ego’s sake I would like to know.

As always the winners will be chosen at random. Leave a comment, get an entry, it’s that simple.

The winner will be announced every Friday, chosen from the comments to this post. Every comment will have 6 chances to win so keep checking back every Friday! Oh, and you can enter up until June 3rd, so have at it!

The winners will be announced as follows:
April 30th – Plume
May 7th – Hushabye
May 14th – Neptune
May 21st – Nest
May 28th – Flutterby
June 4th – Full Moon Forest

I love fabric. I love type. I love typographic fabric. So I made some. Here is what I did, it was super fun. It turned out kind of grungy and I like it. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it. Suggestions?

Here’s how it all went down:

First, it worked best with a lighter color than a darker color. Darker colors require more saturation and caused the dye to bleed under the letters. I went with gray. I mixed 1 package of gray powdered dye with two cups of water and brought it to a simmer on the stove according to the package directions. (I used RIT, you can get it at any craft supply store) The directions say to use salt but it gummed up my spray bottle. Boo.

I cut 6 inch letters from glossy photo paper. The gloss acts as a water resistant coating. You can use anything that’s disposable and relatively moisture friendly. I put a thin coating of spray adhesive or photo spray mount on the back of the letters and let it dry slightly so it was tacky but not sticky. This prevents the stencil from moving around too much.

I let the dye cool slightly and filled a small spray bottle. Test the spray on something so you can get used to the flow. I liked a wide even spray for coverage.

Keeping the bottle high and directly over the letters, I sprayed light even coats over the whole area. If you come in at an angle the dye could seep under the letters.

Hang that sucker out to dry and then machine wash and dry it to make sure it sets.

Materials:

RIT Dye, Spray bottle, fabric I used a Moda Bella Solid in white, plastic drop cloth, spray adhesive, scissors, water resistant paper or other stencil making material.

Getting stuff in addition to helping people is awesome. I am donating a quilt for the Crop for a Cause auction. Neptune seems to be a lucky auction fabric and I am running low on Plume so why mess with a good thing. I used a pattern called Confetti Cake. It looks like those crochet granny square blankets that I find in thrift stores all of the time, only quilted which is fun. Oh, and I have new quilt Labels which is also fun. Yay for fun!

Here are the stats: Crop For A Cause
An all-day scrapbook event to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Saturday April 17th, 2010. 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Located at Elkhorn Hills United Methodist Church
20227 Veterans Drive
Elkhorn, NE 68022

12-hour crop fee, including lunch, dinner, goodie bags & door prizes is $50.

For more information, please visit our blog

*All proceeds will benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.*

My bestest friend, Grace, has a gallery opening tonight! Doors open at 6 p.m. The show, called Liberty or Death, will be up all of this month. If you get a chance and happen to be in the Brooklyn, NY area swing by and check it out. Those portraits up there… they were drawn with pencil. I know right? Amazing.

By the way, Grace, price these three really really high so they don’t sell and then you can give them to me to go with the one that I have. She needs a posse. If I can’t find enough wall space I will build another room.

Here are the stats:

“Liberty or Death”
Reception: Thurs., April 8, 6-8pm
Humanities Gallery
Long Island University, Brooklyn campus

Being so isolated out here in the country can get lonely. I don’t need actual people to talk to as much as the idea of a crowd. Real live people need to be fed, entertained, related to and given places to sleep. It all sounded very exhausting not to mention expensive so I have an alternate solution to tide me over. Plate people! They say all the right stuff, don’t use up all of the toilette paper and never bug me when I’m working.

Remember those dishes I got forever ago at the antique barn? Ya, those. The plan is to make one of every person I love that doesn’t drive me nuts. Just a little silhouette and a descriptive quirk. I really can’t take credit for the idea, I totally snatched it from my friend who had them in her hallway who apparently saw them at Barney’s where they were on display via Jonathan Adler except mine are on plates, so there.

I am having one of those rare and wonderful moments where I don’t actually have anything to do.  I have a special closet for just such an occasion. In this closet there is a wonderland of project ideas that have yet to be realized. This was one of them. I bought a set of blank nesting dolls at a weird little country store about a year ago. Then I painted them… I really thought there would be more to this story but apparently there is not. I am open to name ideas for each of the ladies if you have any.

There comes a time in every young designer’s life when the pin board needs to be revisited. Old things need to be replaced with new things so the trail of inspiration doesn’t go cold or get stale. This is one of my favorite board arrangements and I thought it deserved to be memorialized before I took it all down. I tend to curate my bulletin board. I don’t just throw any old thing up there. It can be as simple as a postcard or a tear sheet from a paint catalog (much like the one on the mid right). These particular pages were liberated from a magazine in the waiting lounge where I get my hair cut.There was a fair amount of coughing and throat clearing that occurred while tearing. They probably thought I had Tuberculosis or something, it went on for ever, I suck at petty crime.

The real gems here are the fabric swatches.  It’s a brief history of fallen soldiers from various fabric lines. On the left you will find the rejected color groupings from Neptune. If I could have made that line 100 pieces I totally would have. There was some really good stuff in there that never got it’s 15 minutes (actually I made a quilt out of them which I will share with y’all as soon as I find my camera again). There is also a little bit of Nest rejects at the top and bottom but my favorite part is in the middle-ish.

These little guys were the original colors for Flutterby. After getting the sample swatches back we decided they were too soft for this line and went completely in the opposite direction. I saved them and they reemerged a couple of years later as Hushabye. So there you have it. Every bulletin board tells a story. I guess I fill mine with the ghosts of lost ideas. What’s on yours?

I am getting tons of emails about guild stuff. Hooray! If you want to know more about it, like the whens the wheres and the what-have yous then go HERE… Join our little network and you will be given magical access to more information than you ever dreamed possible.