Fav Fabrics - Sampler Tutorial & Giveaway!

Fabric and scrapbook design company Basic Grey created a groovy concept for a sampler display canvas. You've likely seen them on other blogs recently - Fat Quarterly had a bunch made up as designer challenges and Amy has done several stunning examples, too. It's cool to see how different people run with the idea of displaying their fav fabrics, notions, trims and even scrapbook paper!

My original plan took a bit of a U-turn. Initially I thought about painting the vines gold and using Christmas fabrics in the circles...sort of a Christmas bauble idea. I considered silk ribbon for embroidering hangers on a few of them, or criss-crossing it over the middle of a few circles as if they were wrapped gifts. The Sharpie Gold Paint pen was a disaster on the canvas. I tested it on the back and it sunk into the canvas with no sheen at all. It was just a dull brown stain. Euw.

So, plan B was Sharpie Silver which looked better (still not what I envisioned, but oh well). Unfortunately, I don't have enough holiday-looking fabric to coordinate with silver so I re-programmed and went with a fav fabrics display for my daughter. She wants us to repaint her bedroom in lime green, purple and turquoise. Hmmm. If I can keep this a secret, it will be a Christmas gift for her. If you'd like to try out a Basic Grey sampler and want some ideas, here's how I did mine:

After the colouring was all done, I scoured my scrap bin for suitable fabrics. Then I cut 3.5" squares of Steam-a-Seam II and stuck it on the back of each scrap, leaving the backing paper ON. Using my GO! Baby and the circle die (thanks Di!), I cut out 2" and 3" circles from the Steam-a-Seam-backed scraps. I also tossed in a few hand dyed wool pieces for a hit of saturated colour. I hadn't considered cutting wool with the GO!, but Paulette recently did a whole bunch and it worked perfectly!

Then I laid everything out with a few buttons and took a photo for reference. All the backing papers were peeled off and, as is typical of me, I chucked the photo and rearranged most of the pieces in a different way. To hold them in place temporarily, I used a Clover mini-iron, just heating the very centre of each circle. This little iron would have crushed the felted wool, so Roxanne's Glue did the job on those ones (honestly, I hadn't intended for this post to become such a product placement....I really have all this stuff and I really use it!).

Now with everything secured, I turned the canvas frame over so I could press firmly from the back to adhere each circle permanently.

I found the whole display rather flat at this point, so it was time for some buttons and embroidery to add texture.

I know the pottery puppy button seems like a complete non sequitur, but if you know D, you know there is nothing she loves more than dogs. I've had these South African-made buttons for ages and this seemed like a place to use one!

Still not completely satisfied, I decided that some ricrac would help frame the whole she-bang so I staple-gunned it around the edges to the back of the frame. A few dabs of hot glue secured it to the canvas. And here you have it:

Now that you see how easy and fun it is to create a display of your fav fabrics, do you want to try one? Have you got a horde of cherished scraps, or bits of baby clothes, or grandma's button collection to display? Basic Grey will send one lucky reader a canvas sampler of their choosing (there are three different styles). If you'd like to leave ONE comment below I will use the random number generator to pick a winner on Saturday morning, Oct.22. The samplers are available to purchase online here.

PLEASE: Your email must be linked to your comment, or written in your comment to win. Use "name(at)network(dot)com" format if you like.

Edited: Comments are now closed, thanks for visiting!