Highlighting the work of Alisa Burke

My good friend Dr C (she's responsible for the name PoldaPop  and a good bit of what appears in this blog) introduced me to the work of Alisa Burke.  What an inspiration!  She's a painter and mixed-media artist who creates fantastic sewing graffiti and paper crafts and a lot of other wild stuff. 

I fell in love with this pillow when I saw it on her blog.  But then flowers seem to run in the Polderman family.  My husband's parents own a flower shop in Michigan and my husband is so good at growing flowers that we had to research ways to stop our dahlias from growing 7 feet high this summer.  While I love looking at Devon's flowers in the garden, I'm not good at growing them myself (my domain in the garden is the vegetable patch).  But I am drawn to making flowers out of fabric.

I recently started investigating what it would take to print my own fabric designs, and Alisa Burke has a new book out that teaches a number of different ways to print on fabric.  I think her Sew Wild will be on my Christmas list this year!  She has on online class on free motion graffiti, which looks like this:

Alisa Burke also has a series of wreath tutorials on her blog and some are really quite simple to construct.  Here are two of my favorites:

Wreath from toilet paper rolls!

Wreath made from canvas, fabric and buttons - maybe this is where some of my buttons will end up!

And for those of you who like to buy things pre-made, Alisa Burke has a lovely online shop.

Orla Kiely and the flower pancakes ...

In case it's not apparent, I love flowers, florals, floral-inspired design etc.  So I will occasionally post about flower-like things completely unrelated to sewing!  I love two things about this post from Not Martha - the great idea for pancakes (gotta love flower-shaped food) and the Orla Kiely table cloth!  If you're attracted to the fabric, take a look at this selection of amazing goodies on Etsy ...