Turn Fabric Scraps into Stunning Kinusiaga Art

Hi there, I'm Crafty Patty, and today I want to show you this beautiful Japanese art form originally developed by Mino Takashi. Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful art form. It's just gorgeous. Now you might hear of the Kinusaga being called quilt without thread. You might hear it called silk painting or fabric painting, but it's a great way to use up your fabric scraps. You can use any kind of fabric, but I find that quilting cottons work the best for me. I know the Japanese like to use up their silk scraps from their kimonos that they've made. Now I will be going over all the supplies you need in the video, but don't worry about writing them down because I will always have a full supply list in the description box below the video, as well as any links to any of the supplies that you might be wanting to use. I'll be taking you step-by-step on how to apply your design, how to cut out the fabrics, and even how to do a fabric border and so much more of tips and tricks. So come along and let's make some beautiful Kinusaga fabric art together. You'll need your high-density XPS foam board. The one I'm using today happens to be two inches in depth, but you can get different depths. This one I just happened to get off Amazon, but you can also get it from your local lumber store or Home Depot kind of store and do get the XPS. Do not get styrofoam. What happens when you get styrofoam is it's got all these little pallets. So when you try to cut in with your exacto knife, you're not gonna get a very exact cut. And as you can see here, it just kept breaking up. So styrofoam does not work. And of course, your ruler, a sharp exacto knife, and a pencil to mark out your lines. Here's a little sample I did using this XPS foam board. The easiest way to transfer your design onto your foam board is with some sheets of double-sided tape. You can get the 3M, again, on Amazon, or you can get them in a cheaper format. Still works, still double-sided, but it does come in smaller sizes. But you can always cut a small strip off if you want to put it on your whole board. You'll want to go through your fabric bin and pull out the colors that you're wanting for your design. And I have kind of gone through and placed it kind of in color categories. This is greens and yellows. These are blues and purples. These are multiple different patterns. And in my pinks. A pair of sewing scissors is great, but you've also got a nice, sharp, small pointed pair of scissors like this. This is going to work out really nice and come in handy for when you're cutting off little pieces of fabric. And I will be using a seam ripper to come in to place my pieces of fabric into the foam board. And I don't need all of this. I'm just going to cut a strip off. If you're wondering how I came up with this design, I did a little bit of a cheat and I asked ChatGPT to draw me a simplified sketch of a tropical sunset. I also asked him to put it in color as well. So now I've got the simplified sketch and I've got some ideas on where I want to place the colors. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to just cut out this portion here and enlarge it to fit onto my foam board. I keep changing my mind on what I want to do. And I'm just telling you, there's many, many options and it'll all be wonderful and beautiful in the end. But giving you some ideas, I was going to do this turtle. That would be really fun. And of course you wouldn't do so much detail. You would just cut out these basic shapes in just more simplified coral. And then I thought, I asked ChatGPT again, and it says, can you make me a simplified tropical background with leaves and a bird in it? And that's what it gave me. So then again, simplifying this as much as you can. And I've got this one I can play around with. And then I love my flowers. So then I asked GPT again, says, could you make me a peony? And again, I've asked for colors. Then again, I've enlarged that so it'll fit onto my board. And I think for this demonstration, I'm going to do the peony. And I wanted to utilize this high density XPS foam board as much as I could with no waste. So to cut a big, thick piece of XPS foam board, I'm going to use my ruler. I've already drawn on my guideline and I'm coming in with a sharp exacto knife. I'm going to come straight down and dig into that board until the edge of my exacto knife is actually hitting onto my ruler. So it's a nice, deep cut. And now that I've made my original cut, I'm now going to come back a second time and just kind of bring it up and down all the way along, cutting it deeper. Holding it over the edge of my table now, I'm now just going to put some pressure on the side here and break it. Once you've broken it, bring it to the other side and use your exacto knife to just clean that cut. And you've made a fairly clean cut. And by trying other methods, I still find that this is the easiest way using the double-sided sheet tape like this. So we're going to peel it back and let's start with half of it and then position it in place. And as you can see, I didn't quite get it, but that's okay. It is really sticky, that's why I said just put on part of it. That's all right, we'll have enough. And then just slide off the rest of it. Now you can have a smaller design and have a larger border or make it a bigger design with a little bit of a smaller border. And I think I'm going to do that. And once you're happy with your placement, just tape on your design with just regular scotch tape. I've kind of gone around and just made sure with my ruler that it's just about right there for an even placement. And our next step is to come in with our exacto knife and cut out all of our shapes. And let's start with this one here. It does not matter where you start, just wherever you're comfortable with your design. And I'm going to come in with my exacto knife and I'm going to come down, just getting that tip, piercing that foam board. And then when you come around a curve, just very slowly follow the curve as neatly as you can and then stop where your pattern ends. Let's come in and you can always move your board so it's easier for you. And now we're coming up to the point. My knife goes down and we're going to cut out that whole portion of that part of the leaf and it all comes off. We're leaving this portion right now. So that's how you do every leaf exactly and the flower portions exactly the same way. Nothing is different. I'm not going to do anything different. This line is going to butt up to this one. So you only have to stop right there. Now this one will come off. Didn't quite cut it, come back in. All right. So I'm going to continue on and do all of these cutouts. So this isn't the easiest part to do, but I'm going to attempt to just take out some of these center parts of our flower and we'll see how it goes. To fill in your background, it's much easier if you've got it in smaller pieces. So what I'm going to do on the actual board when I cut with my knife, I'm showing you on paper here so you can see what I'm doing, is I'll probably do it in little shades of blue or whatever for sky. And I'm probably just going to make some twisty lines like this, maybe come up like that. And that will be one piece. And then I'll kind of give the illusion that it's coming back down here and then maybe come off like that, something like that. And then my next piece, I could do another one that comes like this, would stop there. And then to cut it, we've got to be able to have it so it stops somewhere. So I'm going to come up here and let's make it come up sort of like that. That would be my next piece. Now I've had it, so I've got a break here. So now it's easy. So now I can fill in all this and let's maybe go to there. So that will be another piece. So that one here, again, over here, would be like that. Okay, I got a little carried away with my background lines here and I forgot that I was going to put in a half inch border all the way around. That's okay. We can still come in and I've just measured a half inch in here and a half inch in from here. And then we'll just draw a line to make our border. No big deal. And we'll do the same all the way around. Now it's always nice to keep your original one that you took your photocopies from to enlarge because then you've got a good idea of where you want to place your shadows, your lights and your darks. And as you can see in this one, you've got a dark, you've got a lighter shade, got a lighter shade again. So you can kind of go on that theory just so you don't have two darks together, two lights together, even though it is showing that here. So let's say I chose to use this fabric. So maybe what we'll do, I'll start you off and let's do like this panel right here. You've got a light on the outside. Sorry, but yeah, a light on the outside and you've got the shadow on the inside. So let's find that panel and we'll do that one together. Here's the panel here. That's our lighter shades and here's our two little dark shades here. Stinky metal seam ripper. I'm gonna lift up on the 3M and peel this piece off and it will leave the sticky side behind. So there we've got our little guide and I didn't cut that perfectly. It's our little tiny shadow there. Okay, so now we've got our little guide, piece of fabric that we like and I'm going to choose to use this fabric. So I'm gonna lay it on there and I'm gonna cut around it. Nice little chart pieces like this comes in handy. I'm gonna cut around leaving a fair bit because I found that I have in the past cut too short and then I don't have enough and then we can always trim it off after. We're gonna fold it over and I can use this as my guide because I kind of know where it's gonna be sitting. It's gonna sit kind of like that. Let's say over here, we can lift it up and I can see my line is right there and you can kind of feel with your tool as well. I can kind of go like this and I can feel where it dips in. I can feel it. So let's start at the bottom here. I'm gonna work my way up and it's wanting to just guide along on its own here and you can lift up the fabric and check underneath to make sure that you're going in the right direction to be more of in your nature. You can also feel with your fingers and you can look underneath to see where you're going. You know I've got to come down here a little further and then it's coming back up again. This is when you can come in with your little piece like this, pop it in there and then you can really see where you're going. So I need to come up and that's where I am. So once you're comfortable with your placement and you know you've got enough fabric ready to go in, that's when you come in with your little petite scissors and you can trim off the excess. And now that you've got all the excess trimmed, you just continue on and you keep pulling it across like so and that will go down into the groove you've made with your x-acto knife. And right here was that little piece of darker shading. So let's take that out. I've got a darker piece of fabric here. Let's use that as our shading. Make sure the fabric covers all our areas. And then coming in, and this time you can probably see it quite well underneath because you've done this one here. So again, feel it, bring it up. Feel the other edges. You can look underneath if you need to. There. Once you've got enough fabric and you know you're good, then you can come trim off a little bit more if needed. And then just finish it off by working around your edge, chugging it into the one beside. And don't worry about too much on a line that's going to be beside another one because when this one comes in, it's going to poke down more again as well. Same as this part right here. This one here will come down into this one. Okay, so now you've got a little bit of shading. So that's basically what you do on every one of them. So this is what I've got so far. And I'm finding it very meditative and I'm really enjoying this. But don't try to do it all in one go, that's for sure. Just do a few and relax. And it's not something you want to do, you know, all at once. So I'm going to come back to this tomorrow and we'll work on it again. So I've completed the petal portion of my peony. And as you can see, I totally simplified this part in here and I just put some yellow in. It's very difficult to go up and down in this type of art format. So keep to your slightly rounded edges. Straight lines are the best for the best results. And again, referring to your diagram makes it easier. So we know we've got the lightest, next darkest, next darkest, and then darkest. So that's what I'm going to look for fabric that has four different shades of green. And that's what I've got so far for my leaves. And same process as we did up in here with cutting and placing the fabrics. And I'm looking for lights and darks. And that seems to work. I'll finish up my leaves over here and then we'll start the background. All right, my leaves are done. Loving it. And now we're ready for the background. Because I've got lots of pattern in leaves and my petals, I'm going to try to avoid having too much blue with pattern in it. I'm going to try to work with mostly my solids. I do have one with stripes in here, but you won't probably see that stripe too much. And I think that might look kind of good in the sky. So that's what I'm going to do. And I'm working with all different kinds of blues and maybe some grays. What I'm also going to do is I'm going to carry my pattern on from one side to the other. So if I've got, let's say, this blue here, I'm going to bring it here and then I'm going to carry it through to my other side, wherever my pattern matches up. Actually right here, I think you can see the cut lines. I've got a section here, and then it's actually just a little section right here. And I've now placed all my background pieces. And if you've been watching the whole video, you were listening to how I was talking about do a pattern in a solid. Well, as you can see down here, I've got a pattern with a pattern and it takes away from this leaf. It's okay, but if I was going to teach it, I would make sure that I had a section here that was a solid color to divide from here to here, and this would pop a lot better. So just saying. And as I said early in the video, my frame was an afterthought. So you could make your frame a lot wider, which would have been nice, but this is fine. I do have some black, enough black to do enough for my whole frame. So that's why I'm choosing black, but choose any color you want. I would probably stay with solid rather than a pattern because as we talked about, this will conflict with the flowers here. And this is how I'm going to do the framing. I've cut a piece of fabric that's long enough so I can cut it into my grooves and hold it in place and long enough to go into my groove here, around and onto the back. So I've cut a piece of black fabric that is four inches by 11 inches. And this is how we're going to do our corners. Line up the middle ruler from corner to your corner of your fabric project. And then let's cut with our X-Acto knife a line so we can tuck our fabric in there. And that line is gonna come down over the edge into the side as well. Do the same on this side. Best to cut going away from your artwork. I didn't do that on the first one, as you noticed. What you're going to do is try to get as close as you can to that corner and make a slit going all the way down. A little tricky, but try to do the best you can. And let's take off our top layer so it leaves the sticky side. And then I kind of just go like this so I can even up my sides, allowing for enough to come over top so we can push it into our groove. Push it down. And then just to help things along, I like to put some glue stick here so it holds our fabric in place. Cheaper than putting more of the double-sided tape in there because double-sided tape can be a little bit on the expensive side. Bring that over, push it in place, and you can come around the back and put a little bit of glue stick here as well. Now, just like before, we're going to use our tool to push in that fabric. And then you can probably feel with your nail where you've made your cut, and we're going to push that fabric into the corner, like so. Once you know you've pushed it in, as before, you can cut off the extra fabric and push the rest in. Same for the other corner. And then on your ends, same thing. Find where you made your cut on the side, keeping your fabric nice and taut along here, and push it in, just like we always do. And just get that excess fabric so it comes to the back. If it's too much fabric, you can always cut some off. And I think that'll do it. And these will be getting tucked under like so. And then grab your foam board and your artwork. I've left half an inch on this side, so then I can measure about half an inch on this side, and then we'll cut that fabric off, and then we'll have a piece for our side. Now, of course, if I hadn't put the lines all the way through, my frame was my afterthought, so this would have all been in one piece. But that's okay, it doesn't matter. I know it's hard to see with the black here, but if you've got a little bit too much bulk in here, you can always cut some of that out, and it might be easier to get that last piece of fabric into your groove. Just another little trick. And then I'm just gonna tuck that corner over a little bit, a little flap, and then we'll bring it in like that, and then find our little cut that we grooved, the little groove that we made, and get that to go in. Okay, and you're probably thinking, why is she using glue stick on fabric? Well, it works really good to have fabric onto a type of XPS foam board, but really, I should be using fabric glue to put fabric to fabric. So I've taken up my Aleene's Claire gel tacky glue, and we'll do it properly. I shouldn't be showing you bad things. So I'm just going to, again, put some glue on here, so I can hold this edge together. Now, if this really bugs you, or if you wanna sell your pieces, then you can always grab a piece of cardstock, put it onto the back, glue it on, and then it will look nice and pretty. So I am actually going to use glue stick again, and I will glue that to the back. And just make sure that you're getting your corners well, because that's where it will lift. Okay, and make sure you place it as even as you can, and then you're good to go. And you could even, if you wanted to, write on the back here, you can write your name, if you wanna show who the artist is of your work, then you've got a place to write your name as well. There we go, and our framing is all done. It's got a frame all the way around, and we've even cleaned up the back. Wow, I am definitely addicted to Kinesaga. I found it really hard to stop. I kept saying, just one more piece, just one more piece. And there are so many different designs you can make. You can do abstracts, your pants, seascapes, your own garden. I'm sure I'll be making many more of these. And if you take your time, it is very relaxing and rewarding, as you can see. And you can try practicing on a little small one just to start. This is my little sample that I started with, just to give some practice before you get into your big one. So, thank you for watching. Make lots of beautiful Kinesaga art, and bye-bye for now.