Finished in Time

I finished another quilt yesterday. I was very relieved as I needed this piece to be part of my entry to three different shows. Two of these shows have an April 1 deadline. I still need to take some digital images, but, this morning, I got most of the pictures taken. I love the feeling you get when you've finished something on schedule. It makes me feel so organized. It's all an illusion, of course, but I'm OK with that. At least temporarily.I'm also posting a better image of the quilt I finished a couple of weeks ago. I had to move some furniture in my studio to get back far enough back to properly light this piece, but I'm happy with the photograph.

The Porch Upstairs

We're lucky enough to have both a downstairs and an upstairs porch. At our old place, we had a porch(just one) and a terrific porch swing that we had painted purple. When we moved to our new house a couple of years ago, I thought it would be fun if we had a swing in the upstairs porch. My idea initially met with a little resistance, but, eventually, we bought a swing, painted it purple and hung a swing in the upstairs porch. It is magical to sit there on a weekend morning and look out to the street or just read the paper.
Yesterday, I decided to take pictures of some of the fabric I've been making lately and the upstairs porch seemed just the right spot to lay out my stuff.Here's Abi proving that the swing does actually work. The fabric on the table is some new batiked stuff that I'd just boiled out.We put this wonderfully weathered teak bench on the porch as well. That way, there's enough room for the whole family up there(though that rarely happens). I love the way the gray in the bench looks with these batiked and dyed fabrics.

Tuesday

OK, here's a quick and dirty Tuesday update. I hopefully will have a couple other finished projects and some newly dyed fabric to share in the next few days. I didn't want, though, to miss this Tuesday's scheduled update.
I made this skirt for my youngest, Abi. She really loves it and is pictured here modeling it. My two elder girls must have liked Abi's skirt because they both asked me to make them one as well(in different fabric, of course). I copied a skirt that Abi had and, in fact, was a hand-me down from her elder sister. I really had a good time adapting the pattern. Here's a detail shot of the skirt.

Notes to Myself

I have been keeping journals/notebooks ever since I was in Art School. I'm happy to say that I have notebooks that span about twenty years. I really enjoy looking through old journals and still being able to recognize myself in them. In the past, my notebooks were entirely filled with drawings, but now they seem to be repositories for lists of projects that need to be done, design ideas, all manner of collected curio, and newspaper and magazine clippings. Every once in a while, I'll buy a design magazine and clip out anything and everything that catches my eye. I usually try to note why I collected this image. It's almost always connected to patterning or color. Those seem to be the design elements that speak to me the most.

Two for Tuesday

Today, I'm posting two completed projects. One is a piece that I've posted about quite a bit and that I'm happy is finally finished. The other is something I made on a whim last Sunday afternoon.The photography here isn't great. I hate correcting for the light with Corel Draw because it always over brightens and the colors don't ring true. I also hate that it's yet another gray day here, so when I took this picture, I had to use my flash. I'll take other images of this quilt for show applications and, in that situation, I'll use my light set-up and bracketing. When I have those pictures, I'll post those as well. I just wanted to celebrate being done with this piece.
I'm really excited about this bag I made the other day. I combined several hand-dyed fabrics for the body, piping and lining and used some thrifted fabric for the handles and interior pocket.
Here's a close-up of my elephants. I have a wonderful copper stamp that I bought a couple years ago. I used it with wax resist to get a parade of elephants.

Moody Weather

I like excuses. Not the "dog ate my homework"type, but rather reasons that allow me to do what I wanted to do in the first place. Today's weather certainly feels like an excuse to stay inside and focus on unfinished projects and half-read books. It's not especially severe, but the sky is just the right shade of gray that curling up on the couch is more inviting than digging in the garden. The wind is furious enough to make the wind chimes sound loudly and this drives me inside. There they call sweetly, while on the porch they clang together. Some might call this day gloomy, but I think of it as protective. A misty, wet day beckons us to slow down, stay close to home, and gather around us those we love for a cup of tea. It calls us to cherish the moment, rather than explore the possibilities. I think we all need a few gray days in our lives.

Vacation Day

We've been on Spring Break here for the past week. Though, frankly, I'm not exactly sure what that means when you're home schoolers. As far as I'm concerned, it means I don't have to remind anybody to do anything. The girls had a rather long list of things they wanted to do and places they wanted to go. And, of course, there's still swim team practice to go to, twice a day, every day. This was further complicated by the fact that all the other families in our carpool went out of town, skiing...together(hey, does that mean something?). All this adds up to not as much uninterrupted time to work as I had envisioned for Spring Break.
Today was different. My husband took the day off and took all three girls to Six Flags/ Fiesta Texas in San Antonio. So, this is what I did on my real vacation day.I took pictures of the scarf I recently completed. I probably worked on this baby off and on for six months. I finally pushed through to the end and finished it the other day. This being Texas and March at that, I probably won't need it until next winter, but I really enjoy all the texture in this pattern and the yarn is a super soft alpaca.
I then finished machine quilting this and began binding it. I had, stupidly assumed that sewing the binding on would be fairly quick. I didn't account for the fact that I didn't want the binding to contrast with the body of the quilt, so I had to construct it out of little strips that matched the edges of the quilt(that doesn't really make any sense, but I'm comfortable with that). Long, and uninteresting, story short, it took hours to sew the binding on and I'm still in the process of hand sewing it to the backside of the quilt.
It's a well known fact that you can only spend so many hours hand sewing binding, so I took a little break and made this:A pillow top with the leftovers from some of the commercial fabrics I've been discharging and over dyeing.