More Crazy Stuff

My Mom sent over a bunch of really cool trims...several have found there way onto the block already...

Here's the quilt block as of Monday:


Detail of first day's treatment -its way to close together, but its staying that way! And some of the cool picot tatted laces:


Detail of day five's treatment:


Detail of day four's treatment: the lacing drove me crazy until I saw the picture on sharon b's site - that cleared it all up!


Detail of Picot Tatted Lace- this may get the second half of day three's treatments:


Detail of gold mesh flower (the background actually is a light pink) - Idea came from Annie's Crazy World, who is doing a 100 Days of CQ Details too! I'm not sure I like the green leaves, may take them off and try something else. They are my first attempt at embroidering with ribbon...kinda wonky :

Detail of half of day three's treatments:

This is a Crazy Month!

Here is some progress on my Journal Page for June..Its not done by a long shot...But its turning out to be a blast. I decided to do a Crazy Quilt block...It's something I have wanted to do for a long time and this month seems just crazy enough!

One of the Crazy Quilters in the blogosphere - sharon b - is doing a series in her blog on a 100 Details For 100 Days Her site is a veritable treasure trove! I am kinda 'playing along' but I will run out of seams long before the series is done... Unless....I MAKE MORE CQ BLOCKS! Allison was the one who pointed me to this series...I am grateful! Her Crazy Quilts are a treat to look at! She is going to be following along with the series too.

This is the naked Crazy Quilt block, made out of mostly velvet with a chunk of silk in the middle. These scraps came from the stash I acquired from my Granny. She did lots of charity quilting and people would give her bags and boxes of fabric - she saved the 'fancy stuff' into a separate box:


The innermost white stiching is the outer edge of the size for the Journal Quilts. I plan on making a pillow style backing (with the two overlapping pieces of backing), slipping the Timtex stiffening piece in thru that and buttoning on a piece of fabric with the normal stuff I put on the back. That way I can take it apart if needed...

When I finished the naked block I said to myself "I don't think I particularly like this style of quilting"...But then I started in on the seam treatments and that is FUN FUN FUN!

Here is my progress on decorating the seams as of Sunday AM:
I attempted the first day's treatment (the seam with the green French knots) - I got it just a wee bit cramped so I didn't get all the elements in but I think it looks ok...I did the second day's treatment (the orange and purple seam)... The pink ribbon on the blue piece at the bottom is my attempt to make something like rickrack, which is the basis for day two's second treatment...Which I haven't started. I put in a call to my mom to see if she has any - if she does, I may take my ribbon attempt off - or not! I still have day three, day four and now day five to do!





This is one of the detail seams - its hand made lace with the beads from a necklace that the clasp came off years ago and has been sitting in a baggie in the kitchen drawer waiting for me to fix it...I 'fixed it' alright, eh? (my camera is not taking very good closeup shots...I think there is another setting I need to use...gotta get the book out and read up on close shots - Hopefully will get better pictures as this progresses.)








I went on a hunt for beads and buttons that I could use for embellishment and found I DO have a few hanging around. I found another dead necklace that has some nice maroon beads, some wooden beads, a few bugles, a few beads that are a bit larger than seed beeds, even a few little metal feathers! And the piece-de-resistance...Some milliflore beads I think my daughter made out of Fimo years ago... I dumped out my button collection and separated out all the 'interesting' buttons. We'll see if any of them make the cut to actually get places on my block.

Three Coins in my Coin Purse

My favorite coin purse... I got it as a gift from a friend probably close to 20 years ago. Its been in nearly daily use since then...I love how it fits into my pocket at work so I don't have to drag my full purse down to the cafeteria. Anyway, since its been around that long, it got a wee bit worn. I patched it up a couple of times by sewing fabric to the inside, but as you can see, it was on its very last legs as the leather is crumbling:



I have searched for a coin purse like this one every place I go that has leather goods - but have never found anything close. Nothing to do but take it apart to use it as a pattern to make a new one. Here it is in pieces after I spent some time with it and my handy dandy frog-stitcher:



Here are the supplies I purchased over a year ago (I've known this day was coming for a long time!). A new zipper, some snaps, upholstery thread, BIG needles and of course, some leather!



Sewing leather is a gas. Not the same as fabric at all - it sticks to the bed of the sewing machine and if you start too close to the edge, the leather disappears into the bobbin area and pulls the needle plate up (mine is held in place with magnets...) - you have to start far enough for the feet to get a good grip! And...pinning is not easy - I ended up holding the final pieces together with safety pins! After a few hours, I now have a NEW version...

Not quite the same...the old one is floppier where this one still is stiff...but I expect after a few months it will probably soften up!

I may try making one in ultrasuede as that might be a little easier to sew.

May Journal Quilt Challenge - Raccoon Finds A Home

Here is May's Journal Quilt Challenge (A bit late, but better than never!).







Text from back:

This month I am exploring the wonder of helping Nature.

One of the highlights of May 2006 was participating in a rescued raccoon release. My friend Donna brought five feisty, bright-eyed, fat and sassy raccoons from the raccoon rescue preserve and we released them in the Santa Ana Riverbed. It felt good to be of a small help to our wild friends.


Construction:
The central picture for this month’s piece was an original drawing of a baby raccoon that I did in 1980. The original piece is a bit smaller so I used the enlarge function on my copier and made it the right size for the journal pages.

The raccoon is colored using All Purpose Inks from Tsukineko. Two borders were sewn around the central piece and then fused to the interfacing. Quilting was done around the raccoon and the tree branch.
The back was printed and fused to the interfacing. The outer border was wrapped around the edges and stitched to the back.

Chemistry Lessons for the Fiber Artist - Part Deux

Last Saturday we went for another Fabric Dyeing class - this time for a 12 step Rainbow.

We each picked a red, a blue and a yellow - Mine were Cherry Red, Electric Blue and Lemon Yellow. Then after weighing the fabric, the instructor printed out a recipe for mixing the colors to get Yellow, Yellow Orange, Orange, Red Orange, Red, Violet, Purple, Blue, Indigo,Teal, Green and Yellow Green. We carefully mixed the required amounts into the glass jars and added salt water, the scrunched up muslin and closed the lids. This time I wanted some mottling to occur so I did not shake the jars too much. Every 15 minutes we turned the jars over. Here are my rainbow fabrics 'cooking':



After an hour and half of turning, we added soda ash water and did another hour of turning. Some of the ladies brought knitting to keep busy and some played Soduku...After soaking in the soda ash, it was time to rinse:



It was taking a long time to get each person's 12 pieces rinsed out so I decided to just take mine home and do the rinsing there. Here are my pieces packed up to go home - they are in seperate zipper bags to keep the dyes from bleeding into the other pieces which happens until the excess dye is rinsed out:



After rinsing, and removing the extra dye with Synthrapol and hot water, these are my pretty pieces of fabric.



I am MUCH happier with these than the black graduated series, though that was an interesting experiment. My violet and purple did not come out right, and the oranges are too close..If you have done hand dyeing, you will immediately recognize what went wrong by looking at my red piece. For those who haven't done dyeing - the red has little spots of darker color where the dye did not completely disolve before I distributed it in the glass jars - which means I did not mix it enough. But, I like the steely blue that I got instead of purple and the brownish color instead of the violet is interesting too. And I love the red piece with its darker dots! (I want to try sprinkling dry dye on wet pieces to see what happens!) Overall, I am really happy with the results!

Next lesson is in painting with fabric dye - I am anxious to try dye painting with the thickener.

The Great Raccoon Release

Today was the perfect day for releasing rescued raccoons into the wild...not too hot, a bit overcast and with a mild breeze. My friend went to the rescue preserve and they wrangled 5 fiesty, bright eyed, fat and sassy raccoons, gave them antibiotic shots and stuffed them into an extra large dog crate. She drove out to my house. The raccoons were trying to escape the dog crate - making lots of racket and rocking the cage wildly.

She picked up my DH and me and we headed for the release site in the Santa Ana Riverbed Wilderness Area.

Five raccoons in a dog crate weigh more than 150 pounds...quite a bit of a load to haul. Where we parked is a staging area for horses and a couple of caballeros offered to help my DH with hauling the crate with the raccoons and the bags of dog food (to help the raccoons adjust to their new home) Even with three strong men, they had to stop frequently and readjust their hold on the cage.

We got down close to the river and opened the cage. The raccoons were a bit reluctant to vacate the dog crate! Finally a couple of them headed out and made a beeline for the water.

We ended up taking the crate apart to get the final three raccoons out. One jumped out and ran under the top of the crate (Gimme shelter!) Finally all the raccoons were out and had headed to the water.

I see WATER!

One even looked like he was going to swim to the other side of the river but he noticed his buddies had stopped at a neat looking tree with a cave under the roots and swam over there instead.

I hope they have a good long raccoon life!

Home Sweet Raccoon Home!

Color and Composition - Week One

My Still Life:



Here are my blind contour studies of the still life:
First pass with no peeking

Second pass with some peeking

Third pass looking at still life but not at the page




I still have to do the exercises for contour cutting and contour stitching. I did get a bunch of fabrics out of my stash and only have to get a few for the color wheel - mostly the grays - I found I had a very nice medium gray, but the inbetween ones are not quite there. I may try to dye the grays with the Tsukeniko inks if I cannot find them at the store on the way home tomorrow. I did find a few in the printed side, but need a couple more there too.

April Journal Quilt Challenge - The Promise

April's Journal Quilt Challenge:
This is the pencil study I did for the piece on Palm Sunday, 2006




Front of Journal Page

Text of Back:

This month I am exploring the wonder of God’s Promise
Palm Sunday, 2003. My son was playing the part of Jesus in a Passion Play. The church where this play was being performed was a longish drive from our house. That Sunday morning was drippy and rainy, much like this year’s Palm Sunday. The gray clouds were low and thick with moisture. Since it had rained off and on for the previous couple of weeks, the hills were all green and yellow with a coating of wild mustard plants. On the way to the church early that morning, my husband and I saw the most amazing sight – the clouds parted just a bit and a gorgeous rainbow lit up the ground underneath the break in the clouds. It just seemed so appropriate for us traveling to see a Passion Play to witness such a bright symbol of God’s Promise. I drank in the sight, made a quick sketch on the back of a prescription form and said – “This needs to be a quilt” and I gave it the name of ‘The Promise”, but I had only been quilting for a few months at that point, so I did not know how to approach a landscape quilt. This year, the day before Palm Sunday, I reorganized my sewing supplies into my new sewing room and one of the things I came across in the cleanup process was this scrap of paper with my quick sketch and that became the basis for this month’s piece.

Construction:
Design elements were fused onto the interfacing. I wanted to make ‘thread bunnies’ to represent the trees along the edges of the hills, but ran out of green thread before I could get the machine to do what I wanted. So it ended up being fuzzy yarn stitched to the contours of the hills instead.
The rainbow was trimmed from a piece of material with the rainbow colors but not in the right order so they are little skinny strips of color. The cloud material was purchased at a quilt shop where I safely holed up for a few hours because of a flash flood.
Satin stitching around all the edges of the page completes the construction process.
The rainbow picture above was taken by my daughter Clare.

Chemistry Lessons for the Fiber Artist

Last Saturday, a bunch of my friends and I got together at a quilting shop and took an 8 step graduation fabric dyeing class. I picked Black, expecting to get a nice progression of grays...I was planning on using it for the black to grays needed for the Color and Composition Class that I am taking on the Quilt Studio forum...sigh...the best laid plans of mice and men...don't necessarily work when playing with chemicals!


Dye is mixed with warm water and salt in a carafe.


Here I am adding the dye to the first Mason jar. The fabric is added and then the lid is screwed down.


Every 15 minutes we shook the jars. Instructor Russ said to be careful of any dyes that have blue in them...Too vigorous with the shaking, and you get an explosion! I was careful (black has ALL colors, including blue in it!)


My friend Julia picked a much better color for progression! A nice yellow. The other colors that the class participants picked were kelly green, violet, red and peach.



Julia's first piece, rinsed out by the instructor, Russ.


My results, after washout with Synthrapol and 6 rinses and a full wash with detergent...
Not at all what I expected! I scanned them on top of some real black fabric for contrast. Some of the pieces look olive green, some rather brown and only the last of the eight pieces is grayish. If you are quick, and count the pieces you will see there are actually 9 pieces - the last one in the series was dumped into the leftover dye in a measuring cup...which made it rather mottled. The WOW pieces fared even worse - I have a hard time telling that they any different in shade until I get to the last one....and again the bottom piece was in the measuring cup...

Though my dyed fabric is not what I expected, it WAS loads of fun doing the class. We are going to try the Rainbow progression in a few weeks...that should be way prettier!

How to Disguise Ugly Fabric...

These two quilts are my entries into the 2006 Arizona Retreat Ugly Fabric Challenge.


Bad Sunbonnet Sue and the AZ Challenge Fabric
Bad Sue Does Some Target Practice (Bang)
Bad Sue Feeds Her Cat (Eww, this fabric tastes nasty)
Bad Sue Cleans Up (What a mess...I'm glad I have THIS fabric to clean up with!)
Bad Sue Has A Fabric Roast (Snap! Crackle! Pop!)
Bad Sue Gets Into The Chicken Coop (Oh No...She's making me nest in THAT fabric. My chicks will go blind!)
Bad Sue Slashes Away (Snippety-Snip-Snip-Snip)
Bad Pirate Sue Gives Her Prisoners A Bad Choice (Wear the dress or... walk the plank - NO! I'd rather jump than wear THAT dress...)

This quilt was inspired by Shelley’s (Pirate) ‘comments’ about the Challenge Fabric that Ami (SewingUpAStorm) supplied for the 2006 Arizona Retreat…Bad Sunbonnet Sue does all those bad things Shelley wanted to do to the fabric!

Designed and Quilted by Suze (Casuzen)
January 2006


Escape Velocity
Adapted from the 'Summer Breeze' pattern by Annette Rose

Easter Eggs

When I got to work this morning, I discovered the Easter Bunny had visited our department - there were colorful plastic eggs filled with all sorts of candy, dollar bills and coupons hidden in all the cubicles. It was fun hunting for eggs as there was a random number in each office...Hours later you would hear "I found another one!"
The eggs reminded me of one of my favorite Easter stories. Warning...Get a tissue before you click on the link!
The Empty Egg
(this story is credited to Ida Mae Kempel on some sites, others say its an unknown author...)

HAPPY EASTER TO ALL

Presenting My New...

SEWING ROOM!!!! My son moved to his own place last weekend, so the room he was in became a guest room/storage room/office, while the room where my drafting table was became my sewing room. I have been dreaming of this for months! I started at 8:30 Saturday morning and worked almost non-stop until 8:30 pm...I had a brief break once I moved the desk in for my sewing table and realized that I needed shelves for all the supplies! So I dashed off to the home improvement store and bought a couple of 'do it yourself, easy assembly' shelve sets (False advertising - see below!). I moved boxes, bookcases, clothes, made up the guest bed, vacuumed (twice), dusted, rearranged, built two sets of shelves, did 4 loads of washing and generally wore myself out...I am exhausted and sore, but very happy!

This is my 'design wall' - 2 yards of white diaper flannel.

This is the computer desk I appropriated for my sewing table...Notice the machine is set on the keyboard holder so that its level with the table. Haven't tried this setup yet, but sitting in front of it is comfy!

These are my storage shelves. I had to build them...I cast aspersions on their parentage and the parentage of the designers...the air was a bit blue...everytime I would 'tap' one brace in, another one would pop out...the whole thing collapsed several times...but I perservered and...have shelves..very FULL shelves...I did not realize just how much quilting stuff was stashed around the house! But, its all in here now.

This is my office, where several times a week I work from home...love the 6 second commute!

This is my drafting board - cutting table... I love that its just the right height for me so my back does not get sore.

This is my stash...it needs reorganizing...

This is the bottom bunk in the other room made up as a daybed. It needs its own quilt! I think it turned out pretty cute. I used the mattress from the top bunk for a bolster - the top bunk is being used for storage - mostly wrapping paper and the junk (err, 'stuff') my DD left in the closet when she moved out. Notice Misty the Cat enjoying the bolster! (all three cats have explored the area and have given their stamp of approval on the improvements)

Signs of Spring

It's starting to look like spring!
This is my Saturn peach starting to bloom. Normally this tree blooms in February and has fuzzy little green peaches and lots of leaves by now.



I saw this red-headed, red-breasted bird sitting in my apricot tree. There were actually two pairs of birds, the males with red and the females were much duller with kind of a yellowish tinge. I had to look them up on the web and found they are House Finches and the red color comes from their diet.

March Journal Quilt Challenge - Hope

Here, at last, is March's Journal Quilt. Better late than never...Sorry, was sick most of the month and was just not very inspired to get to finishing the back and binding. Finally got a little burst of energy today. Anyone notice I have kind of a sub-theme going on with my pages? They all have blue backgrounds so far!! ::cue music::Blue skies, shining at me, nothing but blue skies can I see....::music fade::

Text from back:
The daffodil, one of the first flowers of spring, is a symbol of hope. Hope for a world free from disease, hope for a world free from strife. Hope gives us the strength and courage to keep going, with the hope that there will be better days coming.

Construction:
The flowers and stems are free-form cut out of one single piece of batiked fabric that I pre-fused. I did not heavily quilt this piece, as it seemed to ask for simplicity. I accented the flowers and quilted over the stems in the vase to try to give the illusion of the stems being behind glass.

Satin stitching around all the edges of the page completes the construction process.