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my craftsy class, yay !!!

Hello lovelies, remember when I talked about the amazing opportunity I had a few weeks back when I flew to Denver and recorded a sewing class with Craftsy ? Yeah, the class is now live and it all is super surreal, and exciting, and intimidating all at the same time, eeeeek !!! My class Giftable Projects: Zippered Bags and Purse Organizer is a six lesson class with detailed instructions and lots of tips on how to make three different zipper pouches. Would you like to see the pouches I designed for the class? Here we go.  Easy Coin Pouch with removable wrist strap is the first (and easiest project). I love this sweet little pouch and have made quite a few of them for my daughters and their friends already.  The second pouch I teach is Double Zip pouch which makes a perfect pencil pouch or make up bag. I'm also thinking it would make a great hand sewing supplies pouch. Oh, the possibilities :) Last, but definitely not least, is this Keep it Ne...

Plein air step-by-step

I photographed the various stages of my plein air painting in Dochamps, Belgium.
The first thing I do is taking a walk, and look around for interesting shapes, lighting, colors structures...anything that gives me a reason or a challenge to start painting. In this case, I was struck by the mosses on the roof of the house, and the tilted horizon, which can cause interesting compositional challenges.

Here's an overview of my setup. For more information on the materials I use and equipment I bring along, check out this previous post: LINK


I start out with a pencilsketch. I use the sketch only to define the placement and sizes of the objects in the composition. I don't take the drawing any further than this. I want to do the rest of the decisionmaking with a brush in my hands. In other words: I want it to be a painting, not a drawing.


I first put a basic (in this case) yellow tone over the complete canvas, to get rid of the pure white of the paper. This white will appear nowhere in the painting. Then I add light washes to define the basics of the color composition.

I now use thicker paint, to apply accents and tonalities.

I start out adding more detail first at the point of interest of the painting. I can decide later on how much detail the background needs to support the subject of teh painting.

More detailing. At this point (which is quite late) I decided to leave out the pole in the front. I made the mistake of waiting too long to add it in the painting, (I should have done that in the very beginning, when I still had the fexibility in the painting to move stuff around , and play with it, to make it work. Now it became a separate object in the painting, that caused the composition to fall apart. At this point I was frustrated because I didn't think of this at the very beginning, which made me forget to take a picture of the moment I put the pole in, and then paint it over again. That would have been an interesting moment to show... I'm sorry about that...;-)

The final painting. Little details in the front, and less detail in the trees left, lead the eye to the house.
The shift in lighting, because clouds getting in front of the sun, and the movement of the sun because time passes, makes painting outdoors extra challenging. Especially at the and of the day, or in the morning when light changes quickly, I lay in the shadows, so I know xectly where they are, even when they changed already.

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my craftsy class, yay !!!

Hello lovelies, remember when I talked about the amazing opportunity I had a few weeks back when I flew to Denver and recorded a sewing class with Craftsy ? Yeah, the class is now live and it all is super surreal, and exciting, and intimidating all at the same time, eeeeek !!! My class Giftable Projects: Zippered Bags and Purse Organizer is a six lesson class with detailed instructions and lots of tips on how to make three different zipper pouches. Would you like to see the pouches I designed for the class? Here we go.  Easy Coin Pouch with removable wrist strap is the first (and easiest project). I love this sweet little pouch and have made quite a few of them for my daughters and their friends already.  The second pouch I teach is Double Zip pouch which makes a perfect pencil pouch or make up bag. I'm also thinking it would make a great hand sewing supplies pouch. Oh, the possibilities :) Last, but definitely not least, is this Keep it Ne...

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