Crystal Madrilejos

We love encouraging our kids to be creative, especially when it comes to gifts. They are still so young so many of these gifts are collaborations between parents and kids, which I love! One day, they won’t need my help. But I’m hoping they will still want it!

Quil draws or paints almost every day, so we always have a ton of paper with drawing and marks on them. So, I decided to take it up a notch and create something special together by helping him turn a drawing into an embroidered piece of art. The picture above is what we made for Quil’s Grammy last Christmas. Excuse the terrible embroidered text on there that is supposed to say “Q 2012” but looks more like “2022” ha!

Mind you, this is not a completely novel idea. Just search “Embroidered Kid Art” on Google and you will come up with endless posts. A lot of them involve transferring from paper to fabric, but I just had Quil draw directly onto the fabric. Maybe if your kid is older and makes really detailed and clearly representational images, it would be best to start with paper so they have more control, but Quil is still in the scribble phase, so directly on the fabric works for us. Or if you have an image they already created and love and think is worthy of saving in embroidered form, transfer is obviously the way to go.

Color, line and shape were the things I followed when embroidering over his marks. It’s a simple concept, but we learned a thing or two after our first try. (more…)

I’ve been seeing a lot of these types of social gatherings it seems, in the past year or so, popping up all over. Maybe it’s something that’s been around for awhile and only came onto my radar recently, or maybe for someone who went to art school and lived amongst a lot of creatives, these social gatherings were just called “hanging out” and didn’t realize this was somewhat of a novelty for the general masses.

Friends and some family members had started going to drink-and-draws, where you usually go to a drinking establishment and do life drawings. With the exception of the drinking (since I don’t drink alcohol) it sounded right up my alley! Luckily, for my sister’s birthday this past July, one of her friends set up a little surprise get together at a place called Uncork the Artist, where for a fee, you go (and drink) and paint a (rough) reproduction of a famous piece of art at the instruction of what I assume is a local fine art major, or something.

I really had very little expectation of what the atmosphere would be like. But I surprisingly had a fun time. I say surprisingly, because the place was packed with ALL women getting drunk and flirting with a young, male instructor. It was slightly hilarious and I think our table was probably the quietest and most intent on actually painting! The painting itself was fun and very relaxed. We did our own renditions of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night and you could pretty much just do whatever the hell you wanted.

I came away with a painting that Quil really enjoyed and it now is in his and Ellis’ bedroom. Plus, I got to surprise my sister, which was the best part!

xo,
c.

Just wanted to pop in and let you all know that we have a new feature called Q Says Draw where we will be posting drawings that Andrew and I do at the request of Quil. Lately, he’s been doing this a lot, requesting us to draw this or that, and usually it’s of the same thing over and over and over (as you’ll see!) We’ve been trying to document as many of these drawings as we can, though I know there are many that we forgot along the way. Unfortunately, we missed the phase of “Draw a truck with a Christmas tree in the back.” I drew so many of those. Maybe I can still find a few to photograph…

In the meantime, enjoy his current obsession here. Or you can follow the new link the right sidebar. It’s hard to miss. It’s huge.

[Drawing doodle from 2004-ish]

xo,
c.