Looking for Holiday Gifts? Canvasworks has a few items you might like to share. Please order right away if you want to receive them in time for Christmas.

First, we have some things for the home which have Lisa Curry Mair’s artwork printed on them. These are very well made and look great.

Two of our designs available on computer mousepads:

Take a look at this. Amazing!

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been working on the nitty gritty detail work of the Natchez  (Melrose Plantation) floorcloths. They’re coming along, and with the help of lots of NPR for news in the background and books on tape on my iPod, I have been able to plug away at the nearly 100 linear feet of this pattern. I used a large template to line out the 16 7/8″ repeating pattern of stars, and used a burgundy Sharpie marker to define the dividing lines.

	The first step of creating the faux parquet is to apply a wood graining effect. I do this using 3 layers of lightly-stroked color. Here I am applying the first layer of dark brown. I keep the grain going one direction and each tile goes a different direction. It took me a while to figure out how to lay it out so that no 2 tiles which end up next to each other have wood grain which goes in the same direction!I did an entire row of stars with the dark brown grain.
	The second layer is a mustard color. It goes on in the same direction. Here you can see how the tiles are all grained in different directions.
	Now I go over it with the background color of Georgian Brick. This softens the effect of the graining.
	The last step of the graining is to paint on the little squiggles to make it look “quarter sawn”. These are very random, but I try to make them stick with the general direction of the grain of the wood.
	Finally, I use a stencil and a sponge roller to apply burgundy paint to make the dividing lines of the parquet
It takes me almost 2 hours to do the wood graining on one row of 5 stars.So if you’re wondering where to find me, just look in the shop…

.