I Like #141

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!  I hope you all are able to celebrate with friends or family today.  I'm extremely grateful for this fantastic online community of bloggy friends that help make Thanksgiving and things to like every week!  Yay LeeAnna!!

I'm super excited to be home with all my family this weekend to celebrate the holiday, so just a short check in today.

1.  I like being with the kids!  I just got here yesterday but we've already had hours of fun and games.  It snowed yesterday and the kids loved playing outside in it.

2.  Unofortunately this week the dogs unstuffed the footstool again, but I love them anyway.  Look how proud they are of their "work"

3.  I saw this restaurant sign on the way driving yesterday and it made me laugh.  I love velvet but I'm not sure about a velvet taco!

4.  Bentley is so attached to my mom!  As soon as I get here he jumps right up with her and doesn't want to move!

5.  And I loved this artist Shauna Richardson.  She makes beautiful Crocheted-dermy sculptures.  Click on through to see them.  http://www.shaunarichardson.com/contact.php

Happy Thanksgiving to all and head over to LeeAnna's for things to like.

I like #140

I'm a bit late getting things together today, but there are still a bunch of great things to like this week.

1.  I loved getting to work on some quilts this week!  I finished this one (except for the good pictures and the blog post), and I worked on another one that is mid-process.  Super fun!  And I'm about to the time of getting to start something new which is always fun.

2. One of our bloggy friends (sorry I can't remember who it was) shared some great pictures of a granddaughter dressed up as Raggedy Ann and it reminded me of the dolls my mom made me! EDITED:  It was Roseanne's darling Addison who was Raggedy Ann!  My mom was always a great sewer, and back in the early 80s she made several dolls for me and my sister.  Often they were in pairs, or one memorable time she made them with one of her good friends, so all four of us kids had coordinating dolls.  Raggedy Ann is there on the left, Martha is there in the middle (Martha is my middle name), and Linda is on the right.  Martha was really cool because she's real baby size and has articulated arms and legs and wore regular baby clothes.  The story is that the dress she's wearing now is actually the dress I was baptized in, but I'm not sure whether that's true.  The dress Linda is wearing was also one mom made.  These three ladies live in my studio on my bookshelf, and it makes me happy to get them down and share them;  I have lots of fun memories of playing with them, and they remind me that my mom is awesome.

3.  I love my Christmas Cactus!  With just a few flower free weeks since the end of never-ending Dahlia pictures, we're almost to the time of never-ending Christmas cactus pictures.  It makes me so happy every year when the buds come back, I always breathe a sigh of relief.  I'm not sure why, since the Christmas cacti are fairly low maintenance and always bloom, but it's just gratifying when the buds pop up.

4.  I just got my copy of Magic and Memories: 45 Years of International Quilt Festival.  It's a beautiful hardback book written by my bloggy friend Teresa Duryea Wong and chronicles the history of IQF.  I haven't had a chance to fully read it, but it's filled with tons of gorgeous quilt pictures as well as what looks like excellent history and storytelling related to IQF.  Super fantastic!

5.  Got some good snuggle time and walking time with the pups this week.  We also did our annual let's-all-try-to-get-in-the-picture for the Christmas card picture.  Pretty much a fiasco, but at least there is this cute picture of Bentley.

6.  The sunrise was gorgeous earlier this week-  this pic is straight out of my iphone- no editing at all (too bad it's a little out of focus).  The colors were super vibrant and it made me happy to see them.

7.  I really enjoyed looking through the Nikon Small World winners for this year.  It's an annual microscopy contest and that may sound boring but the pictures are gorgeous and really really cool.  Take a look here.

I hope everyone is having a good week!!  Click over to Lee Anna's for more things to like!

I Like #139

Hi Everyone!  Welcome to another week of things to like!


1.  I like my Sam bush!  It's at it's most glorious right now, a bright intense red with almost pink undertones.  The Bullett bush is behind it but is only about 3 inches high and has two leaves.  I really think it might die, it didn't wind up growing at all this year, but I'll plant a new one in the spring if I need to.  In any case, the Sam bush is fantastic.  Loving memories of them both!

2.  I like getting outside!  I got to take Blue on a nice hike around lake Arcadia this Saturday.  After a week of cold (and followed by another week of cold), the temperature hit 70 on Saturday so the hiking was fantastic.

3. I like this begonia!  This is my fourth begonia (I think)- it's my plant nemesis; I always manage to kill them.  But surprise surprise, at the moment this one is doing really well!  It even bloomed while I wasn't looking.  It's the only thing blooming right now, so was a cheery spot of color.  Keep your fingers crossed it continues to do well!

4. I blogged about a second fall quilt I just finished,  I love the way it turned out.  You can check it out here.

5.  I really enjoyed this article on the blog of my friend Teresa Duryea Wong.  It's about an army veteran who took up quilting with his wife after returning from several tours of duty overseas.  There's a lot of great stuff in there; the story was very moving, but I especially like how at the end she talks about how he's now a long haul truck driver (and a National Guardsman) and has set up a mini-quilting studio in his rig!  Definitely worth a read, and very timely this week as we all remember and honor those who serve(d) our nation in the armed forces!

I hope you all had a wonderful week, and hope you will click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

Second Fall Quilt

A week or so ago I shared a Halloween quilt I made using some of the fabrics I dyed and printed in Betty Busby's class.  It incorporated some bits of leftover improv pieced strip sets, and today I'm sharing what they were leftover from!

Last fall I took this picture outside the building where I work.  I thought it would make up into a nice fall quilt, so earlier this year when I was having some other things printed from spoonflower, I had this picture printed too.  I had a weirdly narrow strip of fabric left in my spoonflower width, so I cropped this down to fit that space.  I hate wasting fabric when printing from them.  It's printed on a shiny polyester, so in person it has nice reflectivity, which I think goes with the way the rain was reflecting in the picture.

I decided to do a fairly simple composition, just framing the picture with a border, and decided on some combination of stripes in the border.  I wanted to use my combination of weird fabrics, but those are dreadful to piece with so it came out very improv-like, by which I mean uneven :)


I used a fairly wide variety of fabrics, including sari silk, plain silk, commercial polyester, and hand dyed/painted silk and polyester.  That teal/green/yellow piece is actually a chopped up silk scarf I painted a long time ago.  I also included strips from a cotton dupatta from a salwar kameez I have but don't wear anymore.  The base is black cotton, but there's tons of gold embroidery in it, so strips of that are what I used in the strip sets, as a skinny inner border and as an outer border.

This is what it looked like after  I assembled the top.  It was challenging because since the piecing was so wonky it had a sort of sucked-in-waist look which was decidedly unsquare.  

When I have abstract things that do this, I usually just hack them off square at the end, but of course with the clear embroidered border, I couldn't do that.  I blocked very aggressively, and got it more or less in shape.  There are still a few parts where the binding is uneven with regards to the embroidery pattern in the outer border, but that's life.  It didn't help that I decided to use a dark purple silk for the binding,  that of course was very shifty too.  And then to top it off, the dark purple silk bled everywhere when I got it wet to block.  Luckily it didn't back stain and I think I got it pretty well taken care of.  

So there we have it!  Another fall quilt!  I enjoyed working on it and now I really have to get back to the things I'm *supposed* to be working on!  I hope you're having pretty fall weather wherever you are!

 Linking up to Nina-Marie's this week, click over for more fabulous artistic fiber creations.

I Like #138

Welcome to another week of I Likes!


On Saturday I spent the whole day outside and it was gorgeous crisp sunny fall weather.  Started out cold, and then warmed up, so it proved a lovely chance to wear my fabulous knit hat from Kristin and my fabulous knit headband from Jamie.  I know it looks dorky to put a knit headband over a visor, but it was really very sunny, and I just didn't care!  I was so grateful to be out!!

I made a fair bit of progress on my current abstract quilt,  this is the front of the orange quilt I showed a few weeks back.  The little crescent shaped lines are actually cutouts that will be dimensional petals.

And here's a snap of Bentley (and a little bit of Blue in the background) snoozing away by the yarn tree.  It's raining right now and they were so sad this morning not to get to play ball.

I hope everyone had a good week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!