sketching for next print

Let me know what you think of this one. it is a bit risky for my style, but it is worth it for the message.

Color Reduction Print Finally Finished!

                        After much agony I have finally finished my color reduction print today.  I  created  inspiration for this project after 6 years of being a  vegetarian. I have always believed that in order to eat meat  I would have to murder an innocent animal. I know that this is not always the case, but for the most part I am spot on. I    realize that society has become so centered around a meat based diet that  it has changed our entire economy, health as a country and our environment  It  was hard for me to believe for the years before I became a Vegetarian how much our daily decisions effect everything.  

  Well I'll get off my soap box for now, but the  slightly hidden  narrative behind this piece is that  meat is murder, and I demonstrated this point by showing a typical grocery store meat package, label and all, but with human body parts inside instead of meat. 

A similar protest strategy is used, but on a   much larger scale.  Protesters would place live human beings in side  see through meat containers splattered in red paint with a  meat label on them. It was a shocking slap in the face for me, but is a risky protest. I took that experience and passed it on for others to see. In some ways when you purchase meat from your grocery store you aren't given much information on how that meat got into that package, and for a reason. If you visited, or had to work where that meat came from there is a good chance you wouldn't eat it. (or at least I hope so..) With that being said, I wanted to parallel that somewhat in my artwork by disguising the human body parts to almost look like regular ground meat at first, only discovering the "truth" upon further investigating. 

NO MORE CURLING IRONS

I know this hasn't got much to do with crafting but it is eco-friendly! I often like to curl my hair and now that my hair is getting so much longer it takes two hours plus with a curling iron to get a full head of bouncing curls, SUCH A PAIN! But thanks to the wonderful woman that runs a video blog on Youtube called the lipstick diaries, I am trowing away my curling iron and saying hello to an old fashioned way of curing my hair. Can you believe that an old fashioned way of doing something is 1. Faster, 2. Cheaper, 3. More eco friendly, and 4. more natural looking curls.

Here's the link to the video Click Here She's got a cute accent and she explains how to do this very well. She also has a lot of make up tutorials. All you need is dry hair and a stretchy hairband. As soon as I watched this I wanted to try it! So here's some pictures from my first attempt!

This ones before bed. It took me a few tries but a total of 15 minutes to figure out how to get my long hair all in the back. When I was sleeping the back somewhat fell out but it had no bad effect on the results. In the video she suggests that if you dont want to sleep on this some days you can do this in the morning after a shower and keep this in as a hairstyle and let it out that night or the next morning. I kinda fell in love with having my hair in this because all my hair was off my neck. It also has some bohemian princess look about it. 

and in the morning, excuse my no makeup and sleepy eyes. I couldn't believe how easy this was. I instantly had large natural curls and lots of volume. No products, No heat, and 15 minutes total spent. People will think you spent HOURS on your hair!

I am now looking into other ways to reduce the amount of resources and time I spend on my daily routine. Let me know if you find anything!

Playing With Plastic Bags

         So today my iron and I got a fabulous idea from melting down plastic shopping bags to make a fabric and make things out of it. The material is extremely strong and would be fairly water tight. As I was making the "Plabric" I experimented with making different colors by overlapping different bags to create shades and interesting compositions. After spending a few hours melting fabric sheets I was excited to make all different types of things with this material of course!



      The First prototype I experimented with was the boxy pouch. I have made this pouches before with a wonderful tutorial from another blog, but with fabric. Now it became my mission to make it with plabric. I had to modify the original by not using any liner or interfacing, I felt like the plabric was thick enough as it is, and staying with the eco-friendly theme, i wanted to create a pouch with as much recycled material as possible, and fabric would be a bit detracting  I also used an 8" zipper instead of a 12", simply because that was all I had, but the pouches turned out just fine. The picture on the left shows some of the process. and the right picture shows a finished pouch with its zipper open to see the beautiful insides!

I also decided to use up some scraps from the pouches by making some card wallets. They are a two pouch wallet one on the front and another on the back which holds any type of credit card, business card or folded bill. I think they will make great Christmas gifts for the men in my family. I also have to speak a little bit to my logo tag that I placed on everything I made this evening. I actually created them awhile back and found them in one of my lost craft boxes. I had forgotten how important it is for me to label everything I create so that recipients of my creations can blab about how great I am!

Using Up Some Leather Scraps

I'm not too sure what I will be making from this yet, but I was playing around with these scraps of leather I had from making my Leather Headbands. I sewed them on some scraps of muslin today just playing around with patterns and geometry. Most of the pecies were triangular so I expirmented with making large triangles with the small ones. What else should I make with these scraps? Necklaces and earrings perhaps? 

Going International

Kre8tivebyKatie Now ships internationally! On all of my items I have a wide variety of choices for Shipping choices, and thanks to USPS, they are fairly reasonable! All items now ship first class USPS.  Where will you send your recycled awesomeness?

Redesigning The Shop's Main Page

Looking for some suggestions on decorating my shops homepage. What do you guys think? Also looking for some input on my photographs? Are they too dark? Does the different backgrounds on each item distract you?

Any Input its appreciated and you will receive a coupon to my shop when you reply.