Reconnecting

I am very excited, this afternoon in about 2 hours a cousin that I haven't seen in almost fifty years is going to be here! We grew up in the same area of NY, saw each other frequently as children, then in 1965 we each went in different directions and until last week had no contact with each other. She sent me an email to reconnect, I found out she would be traveling from California back to NY and I invited her to take a 300 mile detour to come see me, and she is on her way!

I have started the t-shirt/cheerleading quilt, there are parts anyway. My granddaughter loves pink so I'm using pink to fill in spaces. Some will be pink and black, I over dyed several pieces of black and white fabric pink. This is what it looks like so far on the design wall.

The Weekly Leaf
For this weeks leaf I used a stencil (from JoAnn's) and paintstiks.

Lots of chain stitch added.
Week #17

Daily Project updates

Line Dance #111- #118

The Daily Paper #39 - #46

Linked to "Off the Wall Friday".

Tulips

My tulips have been in full bloom and I've been a bit obsessive taking photos of the insides of them. Here are a few for inspiration.

The Weekly Leaf
This weeks leaf was done with a mask(the cutout part of a stencil) from Green Pepper press , a paintstik and hand dyed fabric.

Then lots of straight stitches.
Week #16

Daily projects
Line dance #105 - #110

The daily paper #33 - #38

Linked to "Off the Wall Friday"

Mono prints and a pink cat

I'm now in my 4th week of the online mono printing class and I have really learned a lot. I've made lots of prints, most of them no one will ever see, but I'll share a few of them.

A series of yoga prints.

A couple of hand prints.

I've never done much with paper and inks so this has really been a learning experience. Now I've got to figure out how to take some of what I'm learning and transferring it to fabric.

The pink"jaguar" is on it's way to my granddaughter, here he is getting into the travel box.

The Weekly Leaf

This week I used a print made with a rubbing plate, the Gelli plate and Jacquard textile paint on hand dyed fabric.

The leaves were outline stitched with a stem stitch. As I stitched them I became very enthralled with the negative space around the leaves, so I did lots of french knots in that space and left the veins unstitched.
week #15

Daily stitching projects
Line dance #101 - #104

The Daily Paper #29 - #32

Linked to "Off the Wall Friday"

Sewing Challenges

This week I'm working on a variety of sewing challenges. The first one was easy, is done and the happy owner has it. I made a sleeve for fly rod, 36" long with slots of varying sizes to fit the poles.

The second one is slow going, I'm making a stuffed cat. My youngest granddaughter requested a pink jaguar, my son said anything in pink that resembled a cat would do. I found a McCalls pattern for a cat, had some pink fleece and cotton and I'm using a bit of black for ears and nose. I'm not fond of working with small fiddly pieces but I've almost got it done.

The third challenge is for another granddaughter, this one graduating from high school. When her sister graduated I made a t-shirt quilt for her, so that was requested for this graduation also. Today I got the box of t-shirts in the mail. It had 4 t-shirts, a cheerleading jacket, cheerleading uniform top and a head band.

School colors are blue and white, but granddaughters favorite color is pink and there is one pink t-shirt. I'm thinking of doing predominately pink and black for the fabric I add to it, I'll probably dye a pink to match the one pink t-shirt. I'll think it over while I finish the pink jaguar.

Daily project updates

Line Dance #96 - #100

The Daily Paper #24 - #28

Linked to "Off the Wall Friday"

Taking Quilt Photos

Normally when I take photos of my quilts I pin them to my design wall in Studio B. The design wall is 20' long and 8' high, which sounds like a huge space until you put a 10' x 4' print table parallel to it and another 8' x4' perpendicular to it. Although the big table has rollers, there is no where to roll it. The studio is relatively narrow but with the tripod on the table I can usually get in the whole quilt. I've been putting off taking a photo of my finished weekly project from last year and needed to tackle it this week. Because of the way I used beads to sew the squares together I needed to hang the quilt rather than pin it to the wall. I have a quilt stand with tripod legs, the legs are just wide enough that when I hung the quilt I couldn't get a photo because it was too close to the table. I also had no where to hang my lights, they normally are attached to the quilt frames tripod legs. I ended up moving to a spare bedroom and improvised. This is how it looked.

I attached the lights to some ott lights that I have, put one on the bed and one on a chair. Our house is old so there are very few electrical outlets, this picture doesn't show the cords that are allover the floor. But it worked and is still up there, I have a few others that need to have their picture taken.

Weekly stitching project

2013

The Weekly leaf.

This week I used one of my hand carved stamps and stamped three images onto hand dyed fabric.

Week #14

Line Dance #90 -#95

Five rows of them sewn together.

The Daily Paper #18 -#23