Bricks, diamonds and hand stitches

This is the area where I'll be putting my pile of bricks, where all the weeds and crab grass used to be. I've been spending my mornings digging and am now ready to start laying bricks.

Then in the afternoon I've been spending time in the studio. The picture below is what I put on the design wall yesterday. It's the leftovers from the big green diamond quilt, plus a few additions.



It will be my blanket for yoga class. We need a blanket to cover ourselves in the winter when we lay on the floor because the building we use is very cool. I've been using an old quilt I made but it's more lap size and I'm tall and always have extremities hanging out. So this one is long and slender, made just my size.

This is what I should be working on.


It's a very large mono print that I'm doing some hand stitching on. My plan is to get it done and enter it into Quilt National. I can't show you the whole thing because of their entry rules. I must have needed a break from it because I kept finding excuses to go to the kitchen for a snack or to play with other fabric. So I gave in and played with fabric, I really don't need the snacks.

bricks

The above pile of bricks was in front of the old Senior Center in town, they are now in front of my house. A new Senior center was built next door to the old one and the old one is being torn down so there's room for parking. I had a small project planned for my backyard, I only needed 68 bricks. Don decided that since these were very inexpensive he would use them in a project he had planned. So six truckloads of bricks later, and two very sore bodies, the bricks are at our house. We got 800 of them!!! They weigh 12 lbs. apiece and each one had to be put into the truck and then taken out of the truck. Now there's more work ahead getting them in place.

Green diamonds quilt

About a week ago I finished the green diamond quilt that I started last fall at a Kaffe Fasset workshop. It's now hanging in our city library so I've finally taken a picture of it. We have a librarian that loves quilts and always has one on display at the library. There are four commercial printed fabrics in the quilt, all the rest are fabrics (about eighteen of them) that I've dyed and printed. It will hang in the library for about six weeks, then it's new home will be with my oldest son.

Indigo

After whining about not doing anything fabric related yesterday I decided that it was warm enough to make an indigo vat. I've never done indigo before, but the kit has been sitting here waiting for me for a couple of months. I've also had the fabric ready to go, I did several pieces of stitched resist a few months back. The above picture is some of them oxidizing on the clothesline.



This is the first batch all done. The vat is still good and I'll be able to do more. There's a mix of fabrics, silk, cotton and linen, I also did three skeins of pearl cotton. On the far right is a scarf that had been previously dyed a soft brownish pink, it was folded and clamped between two plexiglass squares, so it kept some of the original color. The pieces are all relatively small, at least to me they are. I normally work with a yard or two at a time.

The finished fiddle

The fiddle is done, I'll turn it in this week - ahead of the deadline!

I really want to get back to doing something with fabric. I started doing some hand stitching on one of my mono printed pieces last week and I finished the green diamonds quilt I started last fall. Instead of working with fabric in the studio I've been trying to get some gardening done. Up until Wednesday it had been rather cool and windy, not conducive to gardening. Now It's nice, but almost to warm, it's 80 outside already. I am making progress and I'm creating another area for herbs. I love growing herbs and as you can see from the picture below the bees are loving them also.

Fiddled

Everything has been glued down, then polka dots got added and the first coat of the all weather urethane.



A close up of the buttons and dots.



One more coat of urethane tomorrow and I'll be done! This went a lot faster than I thought it would and has been fun. I have no idea where the idea came from, but I've come to accept that I don't work well with a plan, I need to just start doing and it happens. I do need to have a name for this fiddle - that's really got me stumped.

Still fiddling around

I have all the buttons, cd's and glass marbles laid out and half of them are glued down. Glueing takes some time, but it should be done this afternoon. I had actually wanted to use more buttons,but I ran out and while searching thru my stuff found the marbles that have one flat side - they work perfectly. It's difficult to get a picture of the whole fiddle when it's laying on my table, I stood on a stool and held the camera against the ceiling trying to get the whole thing.

Fiddle progress

I've made progress on the fiddle. The neck stayed black but the rest of it was painted white. I'll be doing circles of buttons around old cd's for the body. The neck has pieces of the old cd's cut up and glued on. Years ago AOL used to send out cd's, I saved them, so I have lots to play with. If you heat them up with a heat gun they are very easy to cut. This afternoon I'll start glueing buttons and cd's down.

What have I gotten myself into???

The big event for the year in Weiser is the National Old Time Fiddlers Contest. It takes place the third week of June. There have been large plywood cutout fiddles, painted brown, that hang around town during that time. This year it was decided that there should be a contest to decorate the fiddles, it was announced about six weeks ago. Since the announcement Don has been dropping hints that I should do one, and I've been saying no. Yesterday I started getting some ideas and decided maybe I should do one. After I picked up the seven foot fiddle(which barely fit in my car), I read the paperwork I signed and realized that I have less than 2 weeks to do this.



This is how it looks now. I'll take more photos as I work on it. I'm still not sure what I'm doing to it, but some of the ideas are a diamond pattern (I've been working on a diamond quilt) or black and white circles. I had breakfast with a friend who suggested I use some of my buttons. It has to be weather proof so fabric would not be a good choice. So what do you think?

Home from another road trip

We've been on a very busy road trip to Nevada. Some great clouds on the way there.

Part of our trip took us out to the middle of Nevada on highway 50 (America's loneliest highway). So we had to stop for photos of the shoe tree. Those are all shoes hanging from the tree. It's been there for many years and the gully beneath the tree is full of shoes that have fallen off.


Also on the trip Don bowled in a tournament, we celebrated a one year olds birthday, saw three of our five kids, and I did a 10k race with my son. Twenty years ago I used to do a bit of race walking and averaged a 12 min. mile. I still walk, but not at that pace or distance so I was pleased that I averaged a bit less than 15 min/ mile. My feet weren't quite as happy.


My son came in 1st in his age group and my 5 yr old grand daughter ran in the kids race, doing a mile in 15 min.

It was a fun trip, but now I'm ready to get back to the studio and actually make something.