A Visit from an Internet Friend

A long time internet friend was in the Boise area and I finally got to meet her. Kathleen Loomis and I were both doing daily pictures about six years ago when we became internet friends, so it was really nice to finally meet her and spend a good part of Saturday with her. Lisa drove her out to Weiser and we spent a couple of hours in my studios and had lunch. We did a lot of sharing of artwork and talking. Kathy showed us her delightful travel stitching, long strips of linen with highlights of her trips depicted in stitch.

After lunch we went back towards Boise and spent some time at Kathleen's studio. What an enjoyable day, it's so much fun when you meet a kindred spirit for the first time and you get along like you've been friends forever.

Part of our discussion involved my "Hands" project that I had put in time out. Both Kathy and Lisa had some good suggestions on what to do about the black hole. I got excited about it again and spent some time on Sunday enlarging a tracing of my hand, then cutting out three of them to use as patterns for some stitching.

My plan is to stitch around the hands in the primary colors, using #3 pearl cotton. I've ordered the colors I need and they should be here by the middle of the week. The white hands will be going away, but I think the heavy colored thread will add enough interest. I really do want to get this done, I've been working on it for over a year. You can read more about it here.

For a change of pace, I played around with some of my rusty bits and different types of tea.

The tea stained the fabric the color, and the tannin in the tea made the grey/black marks when it came in contact with the rust. Here are the  pieces afterwards.

The top two have some possibilities, but they may also just end up as samples in a pile somewhere.

The Weekly Leaf
I got out my TAP(transfer artist paper) and printed a leaf, cut it out and ironed it to my fabric.

Above is the leaf I used and the transfer ready to stitch. I like the subtle changes in the color of the leaf on the fabric.

Week #40

Daily Stitching updates

Gelli prints #271-277

Shades of Orange #198-204

I'll be linking up to "Off the Wall Friday" and "Slow Sunday Stitching"