The end of another year

The year is just about over and I've spent the last week finishing up some things and starting others. I did get the facing, sleeve and label on the big leaf. Took some pictures of it and entered it in the Paducah show. I haven't entered anything there in many years, but this one seemed to be a good fit. So now I get to wait to see if the jurors also think so.

I took a few days away from my mindless sewing, but have gotten enough strips sewn together for a twin size quilt. This picture is of a few of the strips, I do have leftovers for another project.

I've also played with my needle felting machine. I have a project floating around in my head that requires a trip to the store before I can do it. This piece is some cheesecloth and yarns on felt. I do like the needle felting machine and keep thinking I should do some samples, but that's not the way I work, I just want to jump in and make something.

I also started the hand stitching on a larger indigo piece, I did do a smaller one out of the leftovers from this piece a couple of months ago. This has been hanging around waiting for me to get to it.

My friend Dan sent me the following :

My Wishes For You in 2011

12 Months of Happiness,
52 Weeks of Fun,
365 Days of Success,
8760 Hours of Good Health,
52600 Minutes of Good Luck,
3153600 Seconds of Joy
...and that’s all!

Happy New Year

Mindless sewing and christmas music

Latlely I've had the urge to just sit and sew, what I refer to as mindless sewing. So when I came across a bag of batik samples that I've had tucked away for many years I knew it was the perfect time to use them. I thought there were probably about 100-200 pieces in the bag.

As I looked them over I decided that golden yellow would be the perfect addition. I had 1/2 yard, cut it into 1 1/4 " strips and began sewing the samples to the strips

The 1/2 yard did exactly 196 pieces. I had a pile leftover, they seemed to be multiplying. I dyed several more yards of golden yellow and one yard of strips later I finally finished the pile. There were 588 pieces in that gallon plastic bag. It took a couple of hours of pressing to get them ready to sew again.

I've started sewing them together in pairs. Then those will be sewn together until I have long strips, which will be sewn together with golden yellow between strips.

I'm really enjoying doing this and part of it is the music I'm listening to. I love classical music and listen to our local public radio station(Boise State Radio) frequently. While I've been doing this sewing I've been listening to some marvelous Christmas music, not the current commercial choices. The Christmas music will be over before the sewing is done, but I've made a good start on a quilt. A quilt that will probably go to a grand daughter that graduates in June, from both high school and community college at the same time.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

Snow dyeing

Snow dyeing has been a hot topic for the past few winters on a list I'm on, but in the past I've never succumb to the lure of another way to apply dye. Well, we've had lots of snow and there were some dyes leftover from the Thanksgiving tie dyeing festival with granddaughters,so I jumped in and did some snow dyeing. Here are the results.




I may have to do some more!

Christmas Presents

For many years I made Christmas presents, especially for grandchildren, but as they've gotten older and live farther away I've pretty much stopped. This year I made only two of the gifts, the first was over Thanksgiving weekend and was a request for fleece pj bottoms. The second is for my youngest granddaughter and is the sock creature seen below.



I got a new toy for Christmas.


I have talked myself out of a needle felting machine for several years, so this year Santa ordered one for me. I've been collecting roving for awhile, so now I'm ready to play.


Don also got his present early. He got a snow blower and got to use it this morning on our new layer of snow.

My Twin and Christmas postcards

For the last three days my "twin" Kathy Loomis has been doing wonderful posts comparing our photos from our respective daily photo blogs, check them out at Art with a Needle

This morning I decided that if I was going to send out my usual hand made Christmas cards I'd better get them made!! So I pulled out a small quilt in greens that I made about 12 years ago.



I cut it up. I have timtex, misty fuse and wonder under, so everything I needed was on hand. This is my pile of parts, ready for the assembly line.



The backing and tree trunk fused to the 4 x 6 timtex, ready for the tree.



The "trees" cut from the quilt and a red garland stitched on each.



The finished postcards, waiting for address and stamps.



I still have parts of the quilt left so I'll have to come up with something creative to do with it.

Finishing up some projects

I've been trying to get some of my projects done. I've finished my "This is not a Sketchbook" for the sketchbook project and have it ready to mail. The quilting is done on my big leaf quilt, I've just got to trim it ,do the facing, label and sleeve and it will be done.



My sock is progressing, I'm now turning the heel so this one is over half done, only one more to go.


In other news; my on line friend Kathy Loomis has been doing daily photos for almost a year and today she did a post comparing some of my photos with her photos. She has also interviewed me about my daily photo project and will be posting that soon. You can check her posts at Art With a Needle and mine at Thru Linda eyes

Let it Snow

It started snowing very lightly yesterday morning, it's still snowing this morning. I took the photos above from various windows in the house. I should go out and help shovel, but my rational is that I shoveled yesterday so that it would be easier today for Don. The weather reports are saying that it's suppose to warm up this afternoon and start raining, we'll really have a mess then.

I've done a year of photos on my daily photo blog, so you need to go check it out. Pick your favorite photo from the past year, leave a comment by Sunday Dec. 5 and I will send you a 5x7 print of the photo.

More good news & knitting

I got an email yesterday that "Mono print #31" has also been juried into SAQA's "Beyond Comfort" exhibit that will debut next Aug. at the Festival of Quilts, in Birmingham, England. So my quilt gets to do some traveling without me!

I've never been much of a knitter, mainly very big needles and big yarn or fabric cut into 1/2" bias strips. Yet, I've always thought it would be cool to know how to knit socks. So yesterday I got some instruction and started my first pair of socks. I learned how to start at the toe(the hardest part) and work up. So far I have one toe done and I'm really enjoying the process.



I really like the cool variegated yarn also. Time to get some knitting done!

Good news

I got an email yesterday that my "Mono-print #31" was accepted into the "Form not Function", show at the Carnegie Center in New Albany,IN. This was one of the mono prints that I did for the month of March, the last one and the only very large one. The other 30 prints are each on a 20" square of linen, this one is 52" square. The logistics of doing a mono print this large are interesting and I was so happy when I was able to get a clean print on my first try.



It's completely hand stitched with pearl cotton.



Other good news, the two mounted and framed leaf prints in my last post have sold.

Indigo circles done

I finished the stitching on my small indigo circles piece and mounted it on foam core. It's now hanging on the gallery wall at Weiser Classic Candies, a local business that the art guild hangs work in.

I also hung a few other pieces. A pair of mounted and framed leaf prints.

A small stitched piece that was attached to canvas board with gel medium, matted and framed.

A framed 8 x 10 photo of a red door.

And lastly a framed 8 x 10 photo of one of my favorite sunrise pictures.

We hang new work about every two months. This is the first time I've done framed work and my photos. I'm planning on doing more of the photos. Speaking of photos in about 25 days I'll have reached a full year of posting my daily photos and am trying to think of a way to commemorate the occasion. If you have any ideas let me know.

Back in the studio

It took me a couple of days to actually get in the studio to do some work after our trip, but I'm now working on two things. I finally started quilting the big leaf quilt. Slow progress but at least it's getting done.



I take breaks from machine stitching and do hand stitching. I've started stitching on some of the indigo pieces I dyed last spring. This is a small piece (13" x 15"), put together from the scraps of a larger piece. The larger piece is 18" x 45" and I haven't started stitching it yet.



For someone that has always machine quilted, I'm continually surprised by how much I love hand stitching these pieces.

Road trip reflections

We are back home after a 3 week, 6376 mile road trip. We had an enjoyable time, but won't be doing it again anytime soon! Here are a few highlights from our excursion.
Our first stop was to visit relatives in Horseheads,NY, a few miles from Corning. We went to the Corning Glass Museum and saw some fabulous contemporary glass. There was also some very old glass, but the contemporary work just took my breath away. While there I got to do a hands on glass piece, I actually blew the glass myself while an assistant did the rest of the work (the hot stuff). Below is a picture of my piece.



We then travelled on to Maine to visit our eldest granddaughter. She wasn't working while we were there,so she was our tour guide. I did have a lobster.



We went out to the ocean on the only rainy day of our trip. I was standing under my umbrella to take this picture of the Atlantic.



Our next destination was my hometown of Wallkill, NY. We visited my three brothers and some of their families. One morning my brother Don and I took a 6 mile walk along the rail trail. This is a trail on an old defunct railroad bed. A beautiful way to start the day, we shared the trail with several deer and other assorted wild life. Below is a shot from the trail



On our return trip home we saw the best fall colors of the whole trip in Pennsylvania. I showed some in my last post.

It really feels good to be home. We had a wonderful surprise when we got home,we still had tomatoes!!! This has been the most incredible year for tomatoes, I started picking in July and they are still going strong. Normally we have a killing frost by early October, but so far none this year. Below is what I picked from two plants this morning.



Today is being spent getting back to normal routines and doing laundry. Hopefully tomorrow I'll actually get into the studio to make something!!

Heading West

We are now headed back west, today we crossed Pennsylvania. We've had some great visits with family, but it's time to get home. Of course it will take the rest of the week to get there. The pictures below were taken from the car today, the fall colors across PA were great.

A long road trip

We've been on the road for over a week, we've gone from this view of Southern Idaho



to this view of Southern Maine.


We've driven over 3000 miles, have visited relatives in the Corning,NY area, are visiting our oldest granddaughter in Maine and later this week going to my hometown of Wallkill, NY to visit my brothers before driving back home to Idaho. Today we did some budget damage at LL Bean and tomorrow will head north to Arcadia National Park.

A new possibility

My quilt "Seasons" is under consideration to be in a new book published by Lark on nature themed quilts. I won't know until next year if it makes the cut, but for now at least it's being looked at.

SAQA auction

The SAQA auction started yesterday, lots of great quilts to bid on. Mine is about half way down the page here. The picture on the website is better than the one I took. There are two pages of quilts to bid on in this group, the other page is here. The bid amounts go down everyday at 2p.m. eastern time.

A few class pictures

I had six very creative women here on Tuesday and Wednesday for a class and I even remembered to take a couple of pictures. The first two pictures were taken late afternoon on the first day, everyone was sitting and carving stamps. Here are Sue, Shirley, Gretchen and Rena, they chose to sit outside and enjoy the fabulous weather.



Here we have Kathy and Joann, sitting inside with more space to spread out.


Here they are excitedly going thru the fabrics that they've dyed and over dyed and that have just come out of the dryer.


We had a great time, they accomplished a lot and are planning on coming back again to learn more.