Diane Chen's Blog: K.C. Willis Collage Camp!

This past Wednesday I took a fantastic class at The Urban Barn in Escondido: "Collage Camp" taught by K.C. Willis. I had a great time, learned a lot and laughed a lot. Visit her website Lipstick Ranch. The Urban Barn is a great place for a workshop like this, with a huge back room with a roll-up door big enough to drive a truck in, so it was very light and airy. KC brought lots and lots of supplies for us to use; all we needed to bring were scissors, glue and some embellishments. She also brought some kits, "KC in a box" that includes her DVDs, so I got one of those too. I'm looking forward to watching them.

Here's KC setting up before class. You can see a little bit of the fabric pile we had to choose from, and she brought lots of samples for us to look at for inspiration. In the background you can see some of the cool old furniture that The Urban Barn specializes in carrying.

KC talked about how she got started making the fabric collages and how she grew her business into the successful one she has now. She is a great storyteller; it all was quite fascinating.

Her instructions were really good. Considering I had no idea what the class was about, I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't spend any time sitting there wondering what the heck I was doing there! One thing I hadn't realized when I signed up for the class is that it involved (gasp!) using a sewing machine. But I survived with the help of KC and Christine, who's machine I used.

We started with raw canvas, attached pieces of fabric front and back, then kept adding more layers of fabric with glue and/or sewing machine. The images are on fabric using T-shirt transfer paper. All the fabrics and lace were stained to one extent or another with coffee to make them look old. She had some fantastic "birds nest" paper, some corrugated cardboard and some paper with some stiff fibers running through it. This added another interesting dimension to the layers. The most fun was giving the edges of the fabrics and also the paper a burnt look with a paint stripping gun.

Another thing she had were "clumpies", the tangled mess of threads that end up in the washing machine when washing torn fabrics. We used blobs of clumpies as part of the embellishments; very cool.

My friend Davielle was in the class too, and we happened to pick the same image to work with. Here is a picture at the end of the class showing our two projects side-by-side.

After class, Davi invited us to her lovely house where we had a nice relaxing dinner and chat. I had thought I would finish it right away after I got home, but I got somewhat stalled on the embellishments and also the quote. Indecision, indecision. When catching up on my email Thursday I noticed coupons from Michaels so on Friday I went and loaded up on stuff - Sharpie paint pens, some rub-ons, but most importantly flowers and jewelry embellishments to finish this and also in preparation for KC's class in February, a 2-day fabric book class at Urban Barn, which I'm already signed up for.

So today I had great fun finishing the project! I'm really happy with it; now I have to watch her videos to see how to prepare it to hang on the wall. I'm tempted to just grab some little nails and nail it right to the wall!