On the first day of Christmas, give yourself the gift of crafting a beautiful heirloom stocking. Constructed by cutting out and layering wool felt shapes, Portland-based artist Rebecca Ringquist brings to life a collection of charming little holiday motifs that add color and sparkle to your holiday gift giving. From candy canes to sugar cookies, infuse personal touches by adding embroidery, sequins and beads, and then top your stocking with a custom name tag and ribbon for hanging. Creating an heirloom is not a fast project but one you and your family will cherish for generations.

Keep your hands busy and your heart full during this year's Festival of Lights. Artist Faith Hale demonstrates how to make two iconic Hanukkah motifs: the Star of David and a driedel. Use simple folds and paper specific to origami paper (or any text-weight paper in the color palette of your chosing), these projects take only a few simple steps that are easy to complete and memorize. Use the resulting projects to adorn gifts, string on garlands, or mark seating placements at the holiday table.

Introducing CbMixtape! Mixtapes are playlists of specific bits from different classes, grouped together by a common theme. It's a fun way to learn how one topic is approached by a variety of artists with different techniques, all rounded up in one curated mixtape.

Unleash a flurry of creativity while exploring snowy motifs as you make quirky package toppers and whimsical ornaments, enchanting hand-crafted cards and magical snowflakes. You'll have snow much fun perusing expert instruction from some of Creativebug's top instructors as you get ready for the holidays. Want to see more painting tips and tricks from these instructors? Check out their full classes here:

Holiday Craft-Along: 30 Days of Cards, Tags, and Packaging Ideas with Courtney Cerruti
Daily Ornament Challenge: 25 Crafts to Trim Your Tree with Creativebug
Celebrate the Season: A Daily Holiday Painting Practice with Maria Carluccio
Holiday Cricut Crafts: 30 Festive Projects with Amber of Damask Love
A Card a Day with Hero Arts

Make every day feel like a celebration by adorning your home with garlands. They add instant color, joy, and festive vibes to your space, and the best part is that you can make them out of almost anything. Artist Twinkie Chan shows you how to create three different styles of garlands: a cheerful pom pom garland that's also a great craft for kids, a beautiful crepe paper leaf garland that introduces you to some basics of floral design and paper flower construction, and a crocheted popcorn garland that you can use year after year. There's something fun for everyone in this class, and garland-making is a fabulous reason to throw a craft party with your friends and family.

Bring back the nostalgic joy of making the paper snowflakes from your childhood and elevate them with a shibori-inspired dip dye. Mia Semingson is an artist, book binder, and owner of Two Hands Paperie in Boulder, Colorado. She is always looking for creative new ways to express her love of paper, so she combined a familiar snowflake project with a dyeing technique reminiscent of indigo patterns on Japanese resist-dyed fabric. Learn how to fold and cut Japanese washi paper as well as basket-style coffee filters and then play with dye to make decorative, sophisticated snowflakes that are truly one of a kind and a surprise to reveal. Hang individiually as ornaments or hang them together as a beautiful garland.

Ribbon quilts are a traditional quilt form that stack up layers upon layers of fabric strips. Each quilt evolves on its own, and no two are the same. Join award-winning quilter Sarah Bond as she guides you through her process of composing a vibrant and dynamic ribbon quilt, which is not about following a pattern but about playing with color and composition. One of the most frequent questions that Sarah gets from students is "How do you know how to combine colors and fabrics?" Part of the answer is instinct, part of it is experience, and Sarah talks you through value, hue, saturation, contrast, and audtioning fabrics side by side. Strip piece fabric strips to create new fabric constructions, then cut them up and reassemble to make your quilt top. In this class, Sarah encourages you to focus on using solid fabrics without the distraction of print or texture. You may assume that solids are too boring or too simple to make a vibrant quilt, but you'll discover out how truly exciting a ribbon quilt can be.

Learn how to emboss metal with artist Mia Semingson of Two Hands Paperie. Inspired by traditional Mexican tin art, Mia shows you how transformative and flexible metal can be - you can even use the metal from a tube of tomato paste or paint. She begins by demonstrating how to transfer a paper template to thin metal sheet, then learn how to push and pull the metal to create embossed textures and designs with tools you might already have on hand. Find out how to paint your metal projects with alcohol ink to add touches of color. Start with a metal test strip to experiment with your tools and paints, and then Mia will guide you through three different projects: a low-relief ornament with an image of a hand, a sacred heart which includes layered pieces with lots of dimension, and a high-relief embossed box lid which is a wonderful opportunity for upcycling.

This class will be available to view November 15, 2023.

Crochet designer Twinkie Chan loves making crocheted stockings around the holidays. They evoke such warm and nostalgic feelings, and they truly seem like something her Grandma Wendelton would have made. Join Twinkie and learn how to crochet an heirloom granny hexagon stocking. This classic granny hexagon motif is perfect for the season because it resembles a giant snowflake, and Twinkie teaches you the basic granny stitch, which is made of double crochet stitches and chains. You’ll also learn how to work in the round to create a six-sided shape. Choose your own color scheme and how many colors to use, and easily adjust the size of your motifs to change the size of the stocking. To assemble the hexagons into a stocking shape, Twinkie provides several diagrams and guides you through her preferred method of putting it all together with a hand-sewn fabric lining and a hanging loop. Imagine how sweet your home will look with a line of cozy, handmade stockings, waiting to be filled with special treats and holiday magic.

Introducing CbMixtape! Mixtapes are playlists of specific bits from different classes, grouped together by a common theme. It's a fun way to learn how one topic is approached by a variety of artists with different techniques, all rounded up in one curated mixtape.

Unearth the magic of toadstools in this enchanting selection of Creativebug classes. Use pens or markers to make sweet and simple 'shrooms with Lisa Congdon. Then, play with vibrant colors under Carolyn Gavin's guidance with a selection from her Daily Painting Challenge, featuring flowers, fruits, and the natural world.  Learn an intriguing monoprint technique taught by Courtney Cerruti, then use watercolor to paint a field of magical mushrooms with Maria Carluccio. Take a more playful appropach as you sculpt and paint a tiny toadstool to make into an adorable bauble with Courtney Cerruti. 

If these mini lessons inspire you to dig deeper or you want PDF references, check out the full classes listed here:
REPLAY: Daily Drawing Challenge with Lisa Congdon
Daily Painting Challenge: Flowers, Fruits and the Natural World with Carolyn Gavin
Artober: 31 Days of Spooky Monoprints with Courtney Cerruti
Celebrate the Season: A Daily Holiday Painting Practice with Maria Carluccio
Daily Ornament Challenge

This year, don't miss this opportunity to bestow the gift of deliciousness upon your loved ones. Starting with quality ingredients and leveraging a few expert tips, Cobrina of Creativebug demystifies the creation of various costly items that can be effortlessly crafted within the comfort of your own kitchen. Fancy infused salts, decadent compound butters, and handmade candies are just a taste of what you'll learn, and as an added bonus, we have included a set of downloadable recipe cards and gift tags, enabling you to present your culinary creations with a polished and professional touch. Whether you desire a single exquisite item as a thoughtful host gift (or a treat for yourself) or a generous batch to distribute among friends and neighbors, these recipes are tailor-made for gifting and entertaining.

Shelf-life and suggested uses for every recipe are listed on the gift tags in the PDF.

This class will be available to view November 24, 2023.

Make the holiday season even more special with one-of-a-kind, personalized projects. Artists of all ages can craft along with illustrator, toymaker, and storyteller Suzy Ultman as she upcycles regular cereal and cracker boxes into handmade holiday magic. Learn to make a menorah that looks like a unicorn by tracing a template, cutting cardboard, painting it, and creating play-candles with clothespins. Suzy also shows you how to turn cardboard into different holiday shapes with a robust collection of templates to trace as well as tips and ideas for painting the shapes in unique ways. Learn how to bring your own holiday shapes to live and then use them to make gift tags, ornaments, mobiles, and garlands

Introducing CbMixtape! Mixtapes are playlists of specific bits from different classes, grouped together by a common theme. It's a fun way to learn how one topic is approached by a variety of artists with different techniques, all rounded up in one curated mixtape.

Spread your artist wings as you paint, draw, and craft five sweet owls. This selection of classes draws inspiration from our larger daily practice classes, ensuring you'll develop essential skills while creating charming owl-themed works. Keep your eye on the recycling bin as you use upcycled materials to paint a cardboard owl with Suzy Ultman and craft toilet paper tube owls with Courtney Cerruti. Sketch a parliament of owls with Lisa Congdon using markers or pens, then learn Courtney Cerruti's innovative monopriting technique to make two more.

If these mini lessons inspire you to dig deeper, check out the full classes listed here:
Sustainable Play: Upcycled Alphabet Daily Practice with Suzy Ultman
REPLAY: Daily Drawing Challenge by Lisa Congdon
Artober: 31 Days of Inky Monoprints with Courtney Cerruti
Artober: 31 Days of Spooky Monoprints with Courtney Cerruti
Daily Ornament Challenge: 25 Crafts to Trim Your Tree
 

Celebrate spooky season and unlock your inner crochet wizardry with seven Halloween-inspired appliqués: a ghost, pumpkin, spider, and a bat, a skull, a potion bottle and a witch's hat. Twinkie Chan is a crochet designer, author, and believer in the crafterlife. In this class, you'll learn a bewitching array of stitches and techniques, from single crochet up to treble crochet, working in rows and rounds, making an invisible join (or perhaps a phantom join?), and an otherworldly way to change yarn colors. You can use your appliqués for an infinite number of fun projects, like enchanting garlands, spine-tingling party invitations, and the most haunting Halloween treat bags. Whether you're an intrepid beginner or an experienced crocheter, these charming shapes will inspire you to conjure up wickedly delightful decorations that will leave everyone spellbound.

Multi-media maker and author of Handmade Houseplants Corrie Beth Hogg finds magic in the cross-section of nature and art. She fell in love with working with paper because it's so versatile, unpretentious, and accessible. Join Corrie for a foliage-filled month of making four lifelike paper plants to decorate your home: Boston ivy, an oak branch, smooth sumac, and the begonia "fall fashion." These are a few of Corrie's favorite autumnal examples because of the striking, colorful display that the real varieties gift us in the fall. You'll work on one plant at a time and complete a simple step each day, starting with making your own cardboard templates with Corrie's PDFs. Then, learn how to transform paper into leaves with painting, cutting, folding, and hand-drawn details. To turn your leaves into branches, Corrie teaches you how to use floral wire and floral tape.  You'll be able to apply these techniques to just about any plant you love, in any colorway, and for any season. Creating paper plants is a beautiful and meditative way to capture a seasonal moment that can be so fleeting and to keep it for as long as paper lasts.  

When award-winning quilter and designer Sarah Bond first posted photos of her Tiger Moon and Tiger Melon quilt blocks to social media, she encouraged people to describe what they looked like. There's something animal about them, and there's something vegetable about them. Are they coffee beans? Dinosaur eggs? Footballs? To Sarah, they looked like tiger-striped melons, so the name stuck. In this class, Sarah shows you how to paper piece two classic quilt block shapes - a melon and a round moon - each with tapered stripes that allow you to experiment with colors and fabric, dark and light, sun and shadow. You'll get all of Sarah's tips for paper piecing and sewing curves, and these quilt blocks are a great use for fat quarters, yardage, or large scraps.

Turn your favorite fabric scraps into a quilted heirloom holiday stocking with author, designer, and modern quilter Blair Stocker of Wise Craft Handmade. The super-tiny half square triangle units (HSTs) that make up the intricate front piece of your stocking will truly sparkle like multi-faceted gems. To achieve this "quilt sparkle," Blair teaches you about color value, how to determine it in your fabrics using a tool she invented called the Ruby Ruler, and how to use it in your quilt designs. You'll move on to straight-line quilting your stocking panels and sewing together the complete stocking with a cuff and a hanging loop. This is such a special project for using bits of your treasured fabrics to create a one-of-a-kind piece that you and your loved ones can cherish holiday after holiday

As a self-employed professional quilter, Heidi Parkes spends quite a bit of time traveling with her computer, and you better believe she doesn't have just any old laptop case. In this class, she shares her design for how to create a practical and stylish laptop slipcase using a pre-existing quilt or your own quilted fabric. Discover how to measure your device for a perfect fit, sew it together, and incorporate final touches for both protection and aesthetic appeal. The slipcase features double lining, with quilted material both inside and out for added cushioning. The design is very adaptable, allowing you to create a cozy case for whatever needs protecting. It's worth noting that this project can be completed entirely by hand, without the need for a sewing machine.

Introducing CbMixtape! Mixtapes are playlists of specific bits from different classes, grouped together by a common theme. Heidi Parkes is our resident hand yoga expert, reminding us to care for our most important tools. These simple techniques aid in joint health and promote the healthy function of your hands and wrists.  

If these mini lessons inspire you to dig deeper, check out Heidi's two daily practices, both of which include a weekly hand yoga lesson:

Love Letter Quilt Top: A Daily Practice
Story Quilt Top: A Daily Practice in Hand Stitching

If you have experience crocheting, you know that crocheted fabric stretches more lengthwise than vertically The sideways construction of this ribbed sock takes advantage of that aspect for a stretchy and extra comfortable fit. Instructor Cal Patch is a clothing designer and author, and she demonstrates how her modular sock design can magically turn rectangular panels into a perfectly fitting sock. Begin with crocheting the body of the sock in ribbed rows, then work a heel in short rows, and finish with the toe in the round and a ribbed cuff. Cal teaches you how to properly measure your foot and where to adjust your crochet stitches for a sock that is unique to you. You can use any weight of yarn depending on the thickness of the fabric you prefer. There are so many fun yarn and color combinations to explore that once you crochet one sock, you won't want to stop. 

Illustrator and art/literary agent Lilla Rogers has coached thousands of artists and writers through the process of creating children’s books. In this month-long class, use the Magic Writing card deck and follow writing prompts paired with an “oddity” or found object to inspire your writing. Whether you’re looking to learn new writing techniques for your journal, social media, or as the basis for a book idea, this class will introduce you to a plethora of techniques and genres to jumpstart your writing practice. Lilla also shares some agent tips throughout the month for how to pair your art and writing for opportunities to monetize your work, as well as examples of published books, decks and journals that effectively use writing and art together.  Grab a pen and a journal, cozy up in your favorite chair, and embark on a 30-day writing adventure.

Being a professional illustrator is a collaborative process: you must consider the needs of your client, know how to communicate your thoughts and ideas, and be prepared for many changes, all while maintaining your own artistic style. Mariko Jesse has been an illustrator and printmaker for over 25 years. In this class, she takes you through a sample project with an imaginary client from sketch to final product so that you can see the process step by step. She shows you what a client brief can look like as well as the ideation process, receiving client feedback, and completing the art. Whether you work with analog mediums or digital, the communication and business aspects remain the same. There’s isn’t one correct way to be an illustrator, but once you understand the basics, you can work out for yourself how to develop your practice.

It's a colored pencil case for your colored pencils! Of course, you can fill it with whatever you like - pens, sewing tools, sunglasses - any way you use it, it's a wonderful project to showcase your time well-spent embroidering. Portland, Oregon artist Rebecca Ringquist has designed this Dropcloth Sampler for you to embroider by hand with this cute and stylish storage solution in mind. To embroider the pencil pattern, she show stitches such as filled back stitch and brick stitch, and once completed, she shows you how to turn it into a lined, flat zippered case that's just the perfect size to throw in a bag and join you on all your adventures.

To follow along on social media, please post your progress using the tag #LoveLetterQAL

Learn more about Heidi's inspirations behind the Love Letter Quilt pattern and her history of incorporating love into quilts in this live presentation, originally aired August 9, 2023.

See a beautiful compilation of quilts made in this class on our blog.

Accordion books have been around for centuries but are often overlooked. This class explores how something as simple and unassuming as an accordion book can transform into three dramatic, sculptural artists books. The accordion form is deceptively simple, but is the foundation for all kinds of innovative, modern structures. Learn a simple accordion as the foundation, then explore how to evolve the form in three different ways: as a flag book, a tunnel book, and a carousel book. Break through the practical purpose of basic accordion form and create something unique and beautiful that elevates simplicity into art.

Get ready to crochet on the edge. Clothing designer, teacher, and author Cal Patch shows you how adding crochet edgings to your garments can add so much color, texture and interest. Cal covers a few ways to work crochet edgings into existing garments like the necklines of shirts and dresses. You'll warm up with a few simple edgings in single crochet and double crochet stitches and then move on to a few fancier edgings with multiple tiers. You'll also learn how to prepare a neckline before adding crocheted embellishments. These are all fabulous techniques for items you find in the thrift shop, clothing you've made, or something old in your closet that needs a fresh beginning. 

Keep your favorite tiny toes toasty by making these soft and cute baby slippers. Author, illustrator, and maker Sanae Ishida designed these to fit 3-6 month old babies, and they make an excellent gift. Sanae  shows you how to make fox slippers as well as raccoon slippers, beginning with laying the pattern out on fabric, then sewing your project together on a machine. Learn how to add elastic to the heel for a perfect fit, applique with zig-zag stitch, and hand embroider some simple details that will make those adorable animal faces pop. 

Make meal times more fun for your little ones with these animal-themed placemats. Their clean, minimal style is easy to achieve with basic sewing machine skills. Author, illustrator, and maker Sanae Ishida not only shows you how to cut and sew your placemats and use fusible interfacing, but she also teaches you some basic pattern-drafting skills to create your own template. You can make a pointy-eared version and a round-eared version and play a guessing game as to what kind of animals they could be. You'll also learn how to sew a small pocket that is a handy place for utensils, napkins, small toys, or a sweet note. Finished dimensions are 15 1/2" wide x 14" high including ears.