Tip Tuesday: Cleaning Plastic Canvas

Happy Tuesday, everyone!  Did you all have a good weekend?  Mine was ok, though it got cold again on Saturday so I didn't get to go outside.  I'm starting to get some cabin fever, and even though I know this early warm spell isn't good for the plants, I'm beginning to hope for 70 degree weather so I can go sit on my porch or take a long walk.

Today's tip is something you probably don't think about until you need to know.  That's certainly how I was about it, anyway.  It's about how to clean plastic canvas.  I'm sure you're thinking that cleaning plastic canvas is probably easy, but you need to take some care.  After all, you put all that work into making a piece, so you should take care of it as best as you can so it can last many long happy years.

I got the idea for this post when I noticed that one of my coasters was getting some coffee stains on it.

It's a little hard to see in the picture (it's along the upper edge there), but in person it looked pretty ugly.  My MIL once told me that to wash plastic canvas, run it under the faucet.  The problem with doing that with this piece is that it has a felt backing that's glued on with craft glue, which is of course water soluble.  If I ran it under the faucet, the back would likely come unglued.

So I did a little research and played with this coaster a little bit, and I thought I'd share with you what I found out.

How To Clean Plastic Canvas

• If the stain is on the surface, gently dab with a damp paper towel, then with a dry paper towel.  Repeat until the stain comes out.
• If the stain is deeper or has been sitting for a long time, dab with a paper towel dampeded with an oxygen cleaner (like Oxyclean).  Let sit for five minutes.  Dry with a dry paper towel.  Repeat as needed.
• If the piece doesn't use craft glue, and the stain is very bad, you can fill a bowl or bucket with warm water and a small amount of oxygen cleaner and let the PC piece soak in the solution for 5-10 minutes.  Rinse thoroughly and allow to air dry.
• DO NOT RUB!  Acrylic yarn is likely to pill or fray if you rub the piece.  Never use a brush of any kind.  If you need to do a deep cleaning, use a kitchen sprayer to blast water through it (and only if the piece doesn't use craft glue).
• If your piece is dusty, run your vacuum hose gently across the surface to suck it up.  Don't use a brush or hand duster, as this may create pill or embed the dust into the yarn fibers.
• And finally, clean up any stains or messes on your PC piece as soon as you notice them.  The sooner you clean them, the likelier they are to come out.

I ended up dabbing my coaster with a wet paper towel, and then a dry one.  The stain took a couple of passes, but it came out really well.

So there you have it!  I hope that list comes in handy the next time you spill coffee on one of your favorite coasters. 

Tuesday Tip: Plastic Canvas Scraps / How I Buy Plastic Canvas

Hi everyone!  How have you been doing?  Getting through these long winter days without going crazy?  I sure hope so.  I deal with winter by keeping myself busy.  Consequently, that's why I haven't been posting a lot in my blog lately; I've been so busy with side projects that I haven't taken the time to write!  Which I understand is pretty silly.  If I'm bored, I should blog, right?  I promise I'll try to!

Today's tip is a two-fer.  Since both tips are kind of small, I decided to put them together so you get two tips for the price of one! 

My first tip is a pretty simple one.  Saving plastic canvas scraps.  Maybe this seems like a no brainer for you, but it's such an important tip that I figured I'd better mention it.  I mean, there might be someone out there who hadn't thought of this and might thank me later!

If you work with plastic canvas with any frequency, you soon realize that it can be a wasteful craft.  You take a large sheet of PC, cut out the small piece you need for your pattern, and then you're left with half a sheet of PC.  What do you do with it?  Do you throw it away, or do you save it?  If you save it, then what?  Just throw it in a pile?  That could get messy pretty quickly. 

To make my PC go further, I save most of my scraps.  I like having a wide variety of pieces because you never know what size you're going to need, and this saves you from having to cut up a new sheet.  Here's what my scraps look like.

I keep it in one of my plastic drawers.  This is wide enough to hold all but the biggest pieces, and deep enough so I can keep quite a few scraps indeed.  As you can see, I keep all kinds of scraps.  The big pieces are on top, and the smaller ones are on the bottom.

I don't keep every single scrap.  I used to, but then I realized that I actually never use the tiny scraps.  As a rough rule, I tend to only keep pieces that are the size of my palm or bigger.  It's painful, but you do have to throw some pieces away to make sorting through your scraps easier. 

I actually end up using my scraps about half of the time when I'm working with PC.  They're especially useful for magnets and coasters, but any time you're working on a small piece is a great time to poke through your scraps. 

So that was tip #1.  Like I said, probably not much of a revelation, but it's so important to me that I thought I'd better mention it.  The next tip is another way to save money, but this time it's about how I buy PC in the store.  I'm a huge penny pincher, and trust me when I say I've searched for the absolute cheapest way to buy PC, and now I want to share that with you!

For starters, I want to say that this tip will probably change with time, and it may also be different depending on where you live.  As far as I can tell, these prices are at least consistent across the USA.

I always buy my PC in bundle packs. 

I get my regular sheets (10.5x13.5 inches) at JoAnn Fabrics.  They sell packs of 12 for $5.99 regularly.  However, if you can find a 60% off coupon, which I get about once a month in the mail, you can get it for $2.40!  That ends up being about 20 cents a sheet, which is the very cheapest I've seen PC anywhere, by about half actually.  I try to stock up as much as possible.  It's sad to say, but PC isn't very popular and there's that chance that stores may stop carrying it.  I currently have about 4 unopened packages of PC, and lots of loose sheets.  I should be good for a while.

I also frequently use Ultra Stiff  (12x18 inch) PC in my designs.  The best place I've been able to find to buy this is at Walmart.  At least in my local Walmart, they carry a 3-pack for $3.47, which is about $1.15 a piece.  You could technically get it a little cheaper at JoAnn if you take in a 50% off coupon, but they only sell their utra stiff PC as single pieces, so you would need one coupon for each piece, which is kind of a pain.  So I just buy it at Walmart. 

So there you go, folks.  The cheapest way I've seen to buy PC!  Do any of you have a better source for PC?  Can you buy it in super bulk somewhere for even less?  I'd sure love to know if any of you know!  

Tuesday Tip: Yarn Storage

I decided that maybe I should change my name for my tips this week, since this tip isn't exactly plastic canvas related.  So this week it's a Tuesday Tip! 

So as a plastic canvas designer, I decided that I should have a lot of yarn.  I mean a LOT of yarn.  Remember the shopping trip when I came home with this?

 And that was just a small section of my collection.  I have all but four of the solid Red Heart Super Savers colors, plus a ton of stuff from the With Love series and some other random stuff.  I just buy yarn when I like it, lol! 

So how does a crafter sort all this yarn?  Especially if you don't have a lot of room?  I have an art studio that's 8x12.  Not exactly huge, and most of it is filled with a drafting table, large wall mounted ironing board/crafting table, and book shelves.  Here it is in all it's incredibly messy glory.

Somehow it doesn't look that messy in real life, lol.

So as you can see, I just don't have a lot of room for my yarn, and I especially don't have room to keep it well organized.  What's a crafter to do?

I don't have a lot of room in my studio, but I do have some large closets in our den/computer room.  It's a room over the garage, so the roof goes down across the room, and there's a long closet all along one side of the room where the roof is angling down.  It's convenient for storing stuff we don't use very often.  And it also happens to be a great place to store milk crates full of yarn!

Since I don't have to get in there very often, I just piled the crates right inside the doors.  Each crate holds one color family; there's a brown crate, a pink crate, blue, bright green, soft green, purple, black and white, teal, and yellow and orange.

I started out with three crates, and then I asked around to get two more.  I bought two more crates at Home Depot, but cripes they're expensive.  They were about $10 a piece.  I still needed a few more crates though, so I decided for the time being, I'll make due with cheap Rubbermaid crates.  They were 3 for $10!  And they're actually pretty high quality.  Not quite as high quality as the milk crates though.

I wouldn't use this storage system outside of the closet.  My house is very dusty for some reason (I blame cats), and I bet that if these were out in the open, they'd be covered with dust and hair in no time.  Someday I hope to have a huge cupboard with drawers to hold all of my yarn, but for now it's a good work around. 

If you're a yarn freak like me, how do you store it?  I'd love to see everyone's ideas!

Canvas Tip: Ways to Stitch

Happy Election day, all you US citizens!  And to everyone else, happy Tuesday!  Sorry this post is so late; I'm so busy getting ready for my trip on Thursday to visit my brother-in-law.  I love trips, but I just hate all the work you have to do to get ready for them.  Someone should invent a trip readying service!

So today's tip is about two different ways to stitch plastic canvas.  Yes, indeedy, there are two ways to stitch your piece, and believe it or not, it actually makes a difference. 

Now, until recently, I didn't even know that, and my guess is that you probably don't know that either.  It's a little hard to explain in words, so let me try explaining in pictures instead.

Here are the two ways of stitching, shown in continental stitch.  They may not look too different from the front (especially because that's a pretty bad shot!), but here's what it looks like from the back:

Now it should be a little more clear.  The dark green uses a longer stitch in the back than the light green.  I used to stitch the short way, like the light green, because it saved yarn.  Well, that's true, but I also found out recently that it provides less cover.  If there's any dark color behind your stitches, it's much easier to see it if you used the short stitch. And when you're stitching in a dark color, you more even color coverage with the long stitch. 

As an added bonus, it's a million times easier with the long stitch to put your needle under previous stitches to finish the string. 

In case you're still uncertain, here's some graphics to demonstrate the two stitches.

Long stitch

Short stitch

This method of stitching also works for just about every other stitch as well and the benefits apply to all the ones I've used.  Now that I've been using the long stitch on my projects, I really don't see any reason to go back to the short stitch, with two exceptions: if  I only have a small amount of a certain color of yarn to work with, and if I'm going for a more transparent look.  So far, I haven't had either of those cases come up.

So did any of you know the two different ways to stitch?  How have you been stitching all along?  Let me know, I'd love to hear what your experiences are!

Canvas Tip: Dark on Light

If you're anything like me, the back of your plastic canvas work tends to be pretty messy.  Lots of colors, lots of strings stretching over sections of another color, stopping and starting strings in sections of another color.  That's fine.  After all, you don't see the back of your piece most of the time. 

There is one case where it is a problem, though.  When you're working a dark pattern on a light background.  In that case, you can usually see the dark strings quite clearly through the white, and it makes the light color look dingy and the piece look less polished overall.

I'm working on a pattern right now that's dark red on a white background and I've been having to really restrain myself while stitching, so I figured it would be a perfect time to get some pictures of how I do it.

Here's a picture of the front of the finished piece:

If you look closely, you can see a couple of spots where the red shows through the white where I was less careful (for instance, around the top of the bottom star).  If you're very sloppy with your yarn, you'll have that all over instead of in just a couple of small places.

And here is the back without the white so you can see what I did with the red.

Basically I kept it as compact as possible.  Avoid skipping over to other sections as much as possible.  Finish up a block of color before moving on to another block of color.  Travel under stitches as much as possible to keep the traveling thread from escaping into the unstitched area.  If you're going a long distance between blocks of color, secure the thread and cut it, then start it up again in the new spot. 

I think it works better if you work the light color first and then do the dark color.  The piece I'm working on uses a lot of cross stitching, and I like to lay those down before adding other stitches because it looks more consistent, otherwise I would have tried putting the white down first. 

So I hope this tip helped you out a little!  Does anyone else have any tips on how to stitch dark on light?  Or tips on anything else they're working on right now?

Canvas Tip: Shaving Your Finished Project

That title sounds a little weird, doesn't it?  Like I'm about to tell you I'm some kind of weirdo that likes shaving things, lol.  Well I am weird, but not without reason!  (And no, small furry creatures don't have to worry about me sneaking up on them and shaving them.)

When I was working on my Fall Welcome Wall Hanging a couple of weeks ago,  I noticed an interesting problem.  Because the piece is so big, I was rubbing the yarn a lot as I worked, and it started to create pills and piles of fuzz.  Normally a piece made with acrylic yarn gets kind of fuzzy as you work on it simply because the yarn is soft, but it's not usually a problem if it's a small piece.  But this big piece I worked on clearly had some issues.

The pilling was especially bad on the dark red section.

It really looked bad.  I like to present my work as professionally as I can, and I just wasn't happy about those ugly fuzzies.  So I thought, well, what can I do?  The only thing I could think of was to get out my husband's electric shaver.

 I used the straight clipper attachment and gently ran it over the piece.  If you're doing this, don't push down!  You don't want to cut the yarn, just clip the fuzzies on the surface. 

As you can see, I actually got a good amount of fuzz off the piece. 

And now it looks pretty darn good!  The picture doesn't really do it justice, but it's a huge improvement.

So there you go!  If you have problems with fuzz or pilling with your project, just shave it!

Canvas Tip: Plastic Canvas Ruler

The more I work with plastic canvas, the more ways I find to make it a whole lot easier and faster.  I think my very favorite trick I figured out was to use a plastic canvas ruler, which makes counting all those squares/threads a billion times easier, not to mention more accurate!  Don't you just hate it when you get half way into a project and you find out you counted wrong?  Ugh!

There are commercially available plastic canvas rulers, but they're so easy to make that I decided to make my own.  Plus, mine is a lot sturdier than the ones you can buy online.  Mine is made from a leftover piece of matboard, so it's unlikely to get bent or torn.

As you can see, it's a piece of matboard that I've drawn two lines onto, and then marked off the holes on one side and threads on the other.

To use it, I hold the bottom of my plastic canvas level with the bottom of the ruler.  With the holes side, I see the lines through the holes.  On the thread side, I line up the plastic canvas on the other side of the marked lines, and then I match the lines with the threads.

Then I use my trusty dry erase marker to mark the hole or line I want!  It's that simple.

So here's how you make your own.  If you have matboard, use that!  It's the best material.  If you don't, that's ok!  Take a sheet of cardstock and fold it in half.

Glue the two sides together.  A glue stick works well.

Now draw two lines down the center using a ruler.

For the side that measures holes, line up a sheet of plastic canvas to the bottom of your cardstock on the side of the line opposite of the side you want to measure with (I want to measure on the right side of the line, so I put the canvas on the left side).  Carefully draw one small line next to each hole, making every 10th line longer and numbering them 10, 20, 30, etc.  A sheet of cardstock will measure up to 70 holes, which is usually enough for most projects.

Now do the same thing with the thread side: line up the plastic canvas with the bottom of the cardstock, this time on the same side that you want to be measuring with.  Make a mark that lines up with every thread, with a longer mark for every 10th thread.  Make sure to write next to each side whether it's a hole measure or a thread measure.

Great job!  Now you have a cheap, sturdy plastic canvas ruler!   If you have friends that are into plastic canvas, this would make a great gift, especially if you make it really pretty :)

Do any of you have any other good plastic canvas tips?  Or anything you'd like to know for future Canvas Tip posts? 

Canvas Tip: Scissors

When you pick up plastic canvas for the first time, you might not know exactly how you're supposed to cut the canvas.  Or is that just me?  At first, I thought you were supposed to line up the canvas with the graph on the pattern, lol.  Which is a cool idea, except few patterns are actually printed 1:1!  Usually they're a lot smaller to save room.

I eventually figured out you had to just count the holes on the pattern and match those up with your work piece (later on I figured out it was much easier if you marked your canvas).  The next question you might have is what should you cut the canvas with.  We all have scissors, afterall, but I think certain kinds of scissors are better for the job than others.

I was lucky that I already had a nice pair of Iris scissors, which are long handled and meant for precision.  They're the ones on the left in this picture:

They work perfectly; their long handle keeps my fingers out of the way, and the thin, short cutting part lets me do very fine work.

They're not great for ultra stiff plastic though because the blade tends to slip a lot.  That's why I got that other pair of scissors, the purple handled pair above.  You may have seen them in craft catalogs or on craft supply websites.  They're supposed to have serrated blades to hold onto things, which I figured would help with the slipping issue with stiff canvas.  They look cool and all, but unfortunately the pair I got was badly manufactured and has a large gap between cutting blades:

It may not look like much from the picture, but it means that it doesn't cut for crap.  I have safety scissors that I bought for 50 cents that cut better than this expensive pair, which is sad.  These things don't even cut paper!

So that's my opinion about scissors: start with a pair of Iris scissors, which are fairly easy to find and not too expensive.  If you can find some angled surgical scissors, those might be useful too, but I haven't found any yet to try them out.

On a side note, I've actually heard that some people use x-acto knives to cut their canvas, which sounds a little extreme to me.  But if it works for you, give it a try and let me know how it works!

Happy stitching everyone!

Canvas Tip: Dry Erase Markers

I'm not an expert on plastic canvas; actually, I've only been working with it for a couple of years, and truthfully, I've only really gotten into it in the past year or so.  Every day I learn something new about this fascinating craft!  I'm sure there are other newbs out there like me who can benefit from the cool things I learn along the way, so I'm going to try to post little tips on Tuesdays (probably not every Tuesday, but I'll try!) and we can learn together.  Let me know if there's any tips you have that you want to share!

My very first tip is probably the most important thing I learned about plastic canvas, and that is, you should always mark the canvas before you cut!  You have no idea how many perfectly good pieces of canvas I've ruined because I was trying to cut it by looking at the pattern, and I missed a hole somewhere along the way.  That's really frustrating, especially when you're working on a big piece.

But I also know that I don't like using permanent marker for several reasons.  One, because it's not actually as permanent as they'd like you to believe, and I always seem to get ink on my yarn as I stitch.  Two, because if you're working with a light color yarn, and you marked with a dark color, you'll be able to see the marks through the yarn (I learned that one the hard way).

So what can you use that marks plastic but can easily be removed?  Why, dry erase markers!  How brilliant is that?  As soon as I thought of it I went out and bought a three pack at the Dollar Tree (for a dollar of course).

My three pack came with blue, black and red.  The blue and black both work great, but the red is too light to see so I don't actually use it.  Still, two markers for a buck!

It's important to get a marker with a small pointy nib, since you'll be marking thin lines.

And I really like these markers because they have built in erasers on the cap.  Once I mark the canvas and cut it, I just put the cap back on and erase the lines!  So easy!

I've looked for brand name dry erase markers that have a pointy nib and a built in eraser, but they're hard to come by, and boy are they expensive.  So if you have a dollar tree near you, I recommend their markers!  But really, anything will do as long as it has a fine point.  You can always use a paper towel to erase the lines.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today's tip.  Do any of you use dry erase markers?  What about permanent markers?  Or do you just eyeball it?