Monday, January 10, 2011

A New Toy and A New Tote

Within the last month I was browsing through one of the magazines I subscribe to and noticed an advertisement for a pen that is made for writing on fabric. So I stored that information in my head and the other day when I was at my local Hobby Lobby, I found they had this pen in stock. Yay! I purchased one and this is it:


The pen states right on it that:
  • it writes smoothly - Yes, it does
  • it leaves permanent lines - I haven't done any washing tests, but I'm guessing the manufacturers did
  • it doesn't smudge or smear - Yay!
  • the pigment ink is waterproof - probably why they claim it leaves permanent lines.
Below are my two trials with the pen.  The sample on the left is cotton duck, which is a fabric with a bit more texture to it...I found the pen glided along this very smoothly.  The sample on the right is a basic muslin and it worked great there too.


In the past when I wanted to write on fabric, I had been using a Sakura gel pen with similar results as above, but I must say that this Pentel pen is much much smoother.  It will be my first choice when I want to draw or write on fabric.

A few days ago I made this tote bag.  It is a large tote for carrying large or many items.  It is the first one I made, my prototype.


Also a few days ago I overdyed some old denim jeans.  They were very light in color, stonewashed or something like that is what they were called. 


You can see above that the pair of jeans on the right is the original color and the pair on the left, which was the same color originally, was overdyed with amethyst fiber reactive dye.  I am going to do another large tote bag with this purple denim. I am writing up a free tutorial on this big tote for the 3 Creative Studios site, and it will be ready soon.