Kids, bleach and projects

Kids, bleach and projects. Hmmm doesn't sound all that good as a title does it! So we'll start with the kids of course!
Since Bob and I moved into our sub in '96 we've always been shell shocked at the number of kids who come Trick or Treating. We always seem to run out of candy but last year we only had 98 kids. Unsure on how many we would have I only bought 185 pieces to give out. A good thing as last night we were back up in the count! We ran out of candy at 7:15 giving out 182 pieces (Bob ate 2 and I ate one piece!). It's amazing the number of kids that are actually driven into our sub. We still don't know what the reason was for lack of kids in 2008 (weather was nice too!) but we'll plan for 200 for now on. The highest number of kids we had was in 2006 and we ran out at 298 pieces of candy!

So here are 'our' kids all dressed up (Cody had a flower necklace on to greet the kids and Mandy was in her French Maid outfit).

Aren't they cute!!

Cody liked getting his picture taken. Looks like he saying "Hey, where'd you go!" to Mandy! He barked at the first few door bells but after that he just sat and watched the kids. Mandy just LOVES when the kids come. Her tail never stops wagging!

So now on the 'bleach'. I was watching one of Laura Kemshall's latest web video's on bleach resist fabric and thought I'd give this a go since I haven't done any bleach resist in quite awhile. So I started off with using Soft Scrub as this always seemed to work quite well in the past.

I used my foam stamps and with the first letter you can see it was on pretty thick. I just dipped the letter 'C' in the Soft Scrub. After that I used a foam brush to apply the bleach.

Here it is all stamped out.

And here it is all dry and ironed. Funny how a piece of white fabric that is hand dyed and then bleach resist doesn't bleach back to white.

So the next bleach I tried was using liquid bleach full strength. I just poured my bleach into my stamp pad and using a piece of foam started stamping.

Again, this is an old piece of green fabric I dyed years ago.

After rinsing and washing here's the bleached piece. I really liked the colors in this piece and thought I should do something with it.

So now for my 'project' part of this blog. I know..the colors are different but that just depends on whether I've used the flash or not! Sorry about that.. I think this is more the true color of the piece. I had a piece of hand dyed fabric in a similar color so I cut up the bleached piece and added a small strip just to break up the piece. I thought this would make a nice Art of Nature journal piece for November.

I wanted to add some other color to the piece so I made a stencil from a Dover book of a flowers and used Oil Pastel crayons to add the color.

I sandwiched the piece and started stitching away. Here's the stencil part just outlined with stitching. And here's the finished stitched piece. I just did free motion stitching to fill in areas. I didn't care much for the green I used on the leaves and wanted to change that. So I found some old painted fusible webbing I had on hand and I ironed that on top of the green leaves. I think it looks much better. I really liked how this turned out and I decided I'm not cutting it down to the 8 1/2" x 11" journal size. It's 10" x 12 1/2" and I think I'm keeping it this size. I'll just have to make another AON journal for November. So guess that's what I better get moving to do, right!