Leftovers

Hopefully the kind you want as opposed to the kind you consume out of a sense of guilt associated with wasting last night's uneaten dinner. Oh, and also, the kind of leftovers that have nothing to do with last night's dinner. These leftovers are a few unsold items from a little craft fair I participated in yesterday.
A few new camera straps.


And a couple sets of coasters.


I've added them to my shop if you're interested.

Wee Little Photo Shoot

I had me one of those yesterday. At least that's the way I saw it. I had been wanting to photograph a couple of quilts that I made for this book. I hadn't bothered to take any photos before I sent them off, but now that the book is slated for release in May, I figured I'd take a few pictures and add them to my flickr set. I've tried taking full shots of quilts at home or even in studio settings, but they always seem to lose something. Anyway, I remembered a particular spot in a particular park and thought that using that place as a backdrop would be fun, so off I went...to Williamson County Park in lovely Cedar Park, Texas.


It's actually only about 25 minutes from my house and down the street from where my kids and I swim. It's a very well maintained park with a great trail that winds it's way through the park, past soccer fields, a pavilion, and this being Texas, cow pastures. Along the trail is an old, weather beaten shack. It's not big enough to enter. I suspect that it was some kind of grazing station for the cows before the rich and powerful of Williamson County decided to fence off the pasture on the other side of the trail.


I saw it as a perfect venue to shoot my quilts.

Missing in Action

Actually, I'm not missing. I'm just guest blogging over at Simply Robin and I'm giving away some hand dyed fabric bundles. So, if you want to be entered in the drawing, scurry on over there and leave a comment.
While you're there, check out Robin's amazing quilts made out of her own hand dyed fabric. Very inspiring!

Spring means...

Sewing. Actually, every season means sewing, but I love sewing clothes especially in the Spring. In Texas, Spring is really a milder extension of the long summer and that requires the right kind of clothes to brave the heat. This year I've started my Spring/Summer sewing by adapting a pattern to mimic a favorite but worn out top from past years.


I've owned this top for several years, but now it's stained and even a little holey, so no longer wearable. I had thought about taking it apart and creating a pattern based on it, but the prospect of spending that much time ripping seams wasn't particularly appealing.


I happened upon a Simplicity pattern that resembled the original design enough that I thought I could adapt it.


And I did. I selected the version of the pattern that eliminated the ruffle at the bodice and at the armholes and added the ties around the neck edge instead of a collar or facing. I also sewed in fewer buttonholes and buttons because I didn't think that I'd ever want to button it to the neck.
The Swiss dot fabric came from Purl Patchwork online.


It came out pretty much as I envisioned it and I'm definitely planning a second one...maybe even a third.

Triangles

They may not be my all time favorite shapes, but I like them in this form:


And even more so in this form:

Green:: Day Five

I liked green week.

In answer to a question in the comments about who organizes this week or any other for that matter, I found out about this on one of the blogs that usually read. The woman who organized this particular celebration of green also happens to be one of my contacts on flickr. I guess the best answer then is internet word-of-mouth.

Green:: Day Four

I'm apparently so psyched about green week that I've gotten a notion to put up some of my green plates in my green painted bedroom. Perhaps that's green overkill, but I don't really mind. That is until the next week devoted to some other color.

Green:: Day Three

This may be green day #3, but it's also Wednesday. And that means that it's the day we get our weekly Greenling delivery. Greenling is this amazing service that works with a host of local organic farms and producers of other grocery products to bring these items to your front door. We get the local produce box and I just love it. We've done the basket from the local farm thing before and, while the quality of the produce was great, the variety left something to be desired. The problem with relying on just one farm is that if they're harvesting turnips week after week, that's what you're getting. This is not the case with Greenling. Because they buy from several local farms I get something completely new every week and I get fabulous "unique" items I haven't gotten before in farm baskets. These items aren't super exotic, but they're unusual for farm baskets. For instance I get grapefruit and oranges and apples. Today I got avocados. How great is that? I still get greens,onions, tomatoes...all the ususal basket fare. And, of course, I also receive veggies which are not part of our usual diet like kohlrabi, but new is good too, right?
Lately, Wednesday has taken on a whole new luster because it's the day the Greenling truck comes.

Green:: Day Two

I'm going to be frank here for a moment (collective sigh). Finding green things to photograph is not that hard for me. Why? Because my entire bedroom is painted green. And anyone who has an entire room in that color must naturally gravitate toward it.
Case in point: this was on my bedside table.


And these were set on my chest of drawers waiting to be photographed.


There were/are other green things just in that one room, never mind the rest of the house. So, it's safe to say that I'm not exactly searching out the green or finding my inner greenness. It's right out there, on the surface.

Green:: Day One

I'm not going to sugar coat it (pun intended), I've got quite the collection of Altoids containers. First I should point out that I HATE Altoids. In fact I'm not much of a mint fan in general. But my husband feels quite differently. He likes an Altoid or twenty when he sits at his desk in his office. He doesn't however bring each empty container home as it's finished, but accumulates them and "surprises" me with a bagful.
I can't quite put my finger on what it is about these boxes that I find so endearing, but I love them. So much so that I have them stacked on a favorite cake plate on a dresser at the edge of our bed. Now that I've confessed that, I realize how odd that is, but I'm not planning on relocating them to a spot that makes more sense. Though that begs the question," What exactly is the right spot for an empty Altoids container collection?"
No matter. I'm happy to lay on pillow at night and peer through the slats of the bed at my mini mountain of Altoids tins.

Scenes from the Green Room

First I should point out that the green room actually was painted green. Apparently that's not true across the board, but as this was my first experience with the concept of green rooms, I'll just state that green rooms are, in fact, green.
Secondly, lighting in the green room was not the best. Again I could expand this to green rooms across the country, but I won't. So, because I prefer to use available light, my pictures are wee bit dark and not particularly plentiful. Here they are...both of them.


The first picture was taken semi by accident. Sometimes my camera won't let me take a picture because it thinks that there's not enough available light, or the image isn't focused enough, or maybe just the planets aren't aligned. Anyway, I've discovered that if I take a "throw away" shot that the camera will then cooperate. Usually that shot is blurry, so I delete it. This time it turned out to be a pretty decent representation of the walls of the green room. So, there it is.
The taping itself happened in the studio next door and I think went pretty smoothly. First I taped my segment with Pokey Bolton for PBS's Quilting Arts TV. I'm guessing that will air in the Fall, but I'll certainly let you all know when that's scheduled. A little later in the day I taped the DVD workshop. I could not have organized the process and run through it smoothly without the help of Helen Gregory from Quilting Arts Magazine and Kathie Stull who runs the production company in Cleveland. That really made all the difference.
The day was filled with positives, from getting to meet the other folks taping their segments and workshops to having a fabulous dinner with Jennifer from jchandmade . The only "negative" and just barely that was the makeup experience. TV requires a lot of makeup. I understand why, but I'm not much for wearing a lot. My makeup began with more eyebrow plucking. And if you remember back to my previous adventure with eyebrow hair and its removal, you can see why the prospect of more made me nervous. Also, the amount of makeup that was on my face kept catching me by surprise everytime I went to the restroom. It was as if I looked in the mirror expecting to see myself and saw someone else. I found it a little disturbing.
Other than that I enjoyed Cleveland, even the weather. It was quite a change of pace for someone who lives in Texas. I didn't even mind scraping my windshield when the temperature was a chilly 9 degrees. I just wish the rental car company had provided me with a scraper so that I didn't have to use my Barnes and Noble discount card. But, hey, it's good to know that thing comes in handy other than when I'm at the register.

I thought these pictures were particularly appropriate because I'm planning on participating in "Green Week" this week both here on my blog and over at flickr. It starts tomorrow and hopefully I'll have images for all five days.