Following a Common Thread

As I was playing around in the studio with a new fabric technique (more on that below) I decided I needed to create more storage for my growing thread stash. I looked at various plastic boxes available then ran across this on Pinterest.

 My version is the first one pictured above. I had the cute yellow jar that was the vase for birthday flowers from work this year. Yea, we each get a bouquet of flowers on our birthday from the 3 bosses. Rough huh?
So I marched to the hardware store, bought $2 worth of dowels, lopped them off with the pruning shears int he garage, used my pencil sharpener to make the ends pointy, wrapped a piece of rubber band around the end so the spools would stay on. Voila. Decorative, colorful, visible storage for lots of thread.

After that little adventure I tried my hand at "fabric slashing".

The link takes you to Fay Maxwell's video that I watched a couple times. There are great images of the results of this technique if you do a Google search. 

I grabbed lots of scraps and had at it. I learned some things along the way. I would use larger scarps next time and layer colors at random. I layered similar colors in each layer and the result is not a "colorful" Also I would space the lines of stitching a bit wider. Although I have yet to get the piece wet and scrub it to see what happens next.  A trip to the scissor sharpening guy was in order s cutting through all those layers is tough.

              The four little corners I turned back & stitched down really caught my interest. I'll keep you posted and take more pictures as the finished project emerges.