Karlene's Workshop

I’ve been painting! Every now and then my friends and I get together for an arty/crafty painting session. Rather than doing the usual painting on canvases, this time we decided to try stenciling on T-shirts using freezer paper. I had never tried this before as we can’t get freezer paper in the shops here in […]

This is another dress we used in a recent photo shoot, beautifully modeled by my lovely sister. The skirt is made from vintage fabrics and lace. The larger pieces of fabric in the skirt are square shapes, with one corner rounded off in a similar way that circular skirts are cut. Putting many pieces together […]

Some fabrics fray nicely and look cool, like denim or cotton. Other fabrics just make a really big mess with lots of threads going all over the place. I wanted to use some scrappy pieces in the skirt of the dress I am working on without all the mess, so I tried melting the edges […]

This is something I have been working on for a while now. Almost done, just got to do a few more fabric roses. The peach fabric used in the photo above are the leftover pieces from the skirt I shortened here. It’s turned out very differently from my original idea but still very pretty all […]

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks here getting organized to go to our friends wedding last weekend. We had to travel a long way, 7hrs drive to the grandparents, chit chat and drop off kids, next day another 3hrs to where we are staying. Keith is the official photographer and wants to go to […]

I used the rest of Mum’s old dress to make a ruffle wrap for my niece, to match the skirt. I started off with a strip cut from the under dress to form the base. This layer of the dress was cut on the bias, so my strip is now bias cut without any effort. […]

I was inspired by these gorgeous felt flowers made by Koala Brains and it gave me an idea of how to use up all those leftover circles you get after cutting out circular/fairy skirts. I will show you how I did mine, with 5 petals. My method is a little different, after having a play […]