Crafty Belles

Perhaps you’ve seen a lot of paintings already and out of the paintings you’ve seen, you appreciate only a few of them. You see, there are different painting styles and techniques used by painters. One of these styles is abstract painting. When you say abstract painting, not many appreciate it probably because of its different style and not so ordinary appearance. But despite the oddness of such painting style, you should not judge it at first sight. Instead, you should try to understand why it was painted.

Abstract painting started hundreds of years ago. There are famous abstract paintings housed in museums. Private collectors who love abstract painting also have some of them. Abstract paintings are good investments as well as collection items. You’ll never know how much a certain painting would cost in the future and with the great awareness and appreciation of people nowadays for abstract painting, even you can’t tell a paintings value. Some of the famous abstract painters were Picasso, Van Gogh, and Modigliani. Because of these artist’s beautiful works, abstract painting became even more famous. (more…)

There’s not much worse than looking through your completed scrapbook and finding that your book’s layout is a mess. One page is crammed, the next is empty. Take the time to read the following ideas about scrapbook layouts to ensure that you are satisfied when you look through your finished product.

Every scrapbooker needs to know how to balance photos on scrapbook pages. When cropping photos, an easy way to achieve balance across a page layout is to crop two or more photos to the same size. A photo cropped to 3” x 4” will balance another cropped to 4” x 3”.

(more…)

Maintenance Is The Key

Knitting fabric takes a lot of time and involves a lot of sweat and toil. Wouldn’t it be devastating if the sweater you spent hours knitting didn’t last more than a few washes? I certainly would be shattered if I was not able to use something I have created with such effort waste away too quick. Mostly we would end up blaming the yarn and cursing ourselves for not picking better quality stuff. However, most of us do not ever consider bad maintenance as a probable cause of the fabric’s short life.

Maintenance is the key to long life for any kind of fabric, specially the kind that you have spent hours knitting. Just a few careful considerations and you can ensure a long life for your knitted fabric. Trust me, it is easier than you can imagine! All you need to do is keep the following things in mind while taking care of you knitted fabrics. (more…)

The basics of knitting can be summed-up in two stitches: the knit stitch and the purl stitch. A basic pattern in knitting has stitches from the “right side” (knit stitch) and from the “wrong side” (purls stitch). In this article, you will find basic instructions for knitting these two stitches. Once you have understood how to cast on, you can move on to trying out the following instructions for the knit stitch as well as the purl stitch.

The Knit Stitch:

The knit stitch is the most basic stitch in knitting. Not only is it the easiest to learn, it is also the first step to learning any of the other more complex stitches. Once the casting on work is done, you can begin to knit stitches from back to front. Holding the needle with the stitches that you cast on in your left hand you must place the tip of the other needle between the first and the second stitch. Now push this needle, from under the needle in you left hand, into the first stitch. Once you have the tip of the needle peeking out from under the left needle and through the first stitch, loop the yarn around the tip of the right needle from back to front. To proceed, carefully pull the yarn out of the first stitch and the needle in the front and let the old stitch slip off the left needle. Be sure to let the yarn loose at this point or else, it could leave gaps in your fabric. Continue the process until you have shifted all the stitches off the left needle to the right needle. (more…)