I Like #279

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

I'm in the earliest stages of figuring out how to migrate my blog over to run through my squarespace website, I'm so aggravated by not getting emails when kind people leave me comments.  It may take a little while, but stay tuned for that.

It's been a challenging few days here, late last week my parents suddenly and unexpectedly lost their beloved dog Jordy.  He was only 8, and evidently had an aggresive and unknown spleen cancer that had metastasized to his lungs.  He was the best good sweet friendly boy.  So very attached to my dad, he followed him around everywhere.  He loved to roll in all the smelly stuff in the forest and stayed right with you while hiking.  It was so tough on my parents to lose him, especially after already losing their dog Shooter a few months ago.

A week or so ago (before losing Jordy) my parents had rescued a stray puppy they found while hiking, but they weren't in the place for a new puppy so they took him to the local shelter. After Jordy passed, they felt like maybe the puppy was meant to come be with them, so they went and adopted him.  He's named Quark and is super adorable.  Here he is curled up with my parents' other dog Swatch.

Unfortunately, after only a few days he came down with Parvo.  Everyone has fallen deeply in love with him, and this just feels like one more emotional blow.  He's in the vet hospital and my dad is good friends with the vet and staff so we know he is receiving excellent care, but Parvo is hard on puppies, so we are all just praying he makes it through.

My puppies are fine, and they went and got extra parvo (DHPP) boosters yesterday since we are headed to my parents's place next week.

We have had several nights with hard freeze starting with last Friday night, so on Friday morning I went out and cut all the flowers that were left in my garden.  One last hurrah.

I'm so glad I cut everything because by Saturday morning this is what the garden looked like.  I'll need to do some garden cleanup at some point but so far I'm just enjoying the flowers inside.

Some good things this week amid the stress.

On Saturday night my friends and I went out to eat at a restaurant that's inside the lobby of this gorgeous historic art deco skyscraper in downtown OKC.  I'd never been in there before and it was just beautiful.  So many beautiful architectural details, I'd have liked to just wander around taking pictures.

Then yesterday I made a batch of red chile sauce in preparation for a winter's worth of posole-making.  I even managed not to get chile in my eyes.  The whole house smelled lovely while the chile pods were cooking.

I also blogged about a new quilt this week whose theme is trying to stay grateful.  Feels timely.  Read more about it here.

Thanksgiving is coming next week, and we're all just hoping and praying that Quark gets better.  

Click over to LeeAnna's to join the conversation, this community she's created is definitely something I'm always grateful for!

New Quilt-Grateful

My blogging catch up continues!  Last week I blogged about my two ice quilts which I actuall made and finished this summer/early fall.  More recently I decided I wanted to try to make a piece for the SAQA call for entry called Minimalism.  I'm not exactly a minimalist but I'd had this idea for a white quilt with intertwined rainbow ribbons in my brain for a while and it seemed like the time to try it.  I'd never really been sure how I'd make it, whether I'd piece or applique something, but I decided after doing this yarn-covered Alleluia Alleluia piece earlier in the year that I would do it using couched yarn. 

I started with a blue fabric/batting sandwich and first couched down all the rainbow ribbons using stash yarn.  

My goal had been to use all stash stuff for this project, but I decided that I should have one color of white yarn for the background and since the quilt is fairly big, I did buy a new skein of inexpensive white acrylic yarn.  I started filling in the background- you can see below that I just sort of meandered around couching down the white yarn until the entire piece was covered.  

There are letters in the white yarn, it says "I will be grateful for today."  In the picture below you can see the word today at the end, but the words are very subtle and hidden in the final piece because they're couched in the same color as the rest of the background.  I think it's a good mantra, although I'm not always that good at remembering it.

This happy guy joined me for one of my marathon saturday quilting/couching sessions!

After finishing the white couching, I went back and put down another layer over many of the colored ribbons since some of them had gotten a bit over-run by the white and were receding into the background.

It was a hard quilt to photograph with all that white, but here are a few detail shots of the final thing.  I enjoyed using different colors of top thread to couch down the white yarn so there are some subtle variations in color across the background. 

It took quite a while to fill in the entire quilt with courched yarn, but I find quilting to be very calming and meditative, and I enjoyed the process a lot.  I love the texture that comes from the yarn!

Here's the final piece, it's 48" wide x 31" high.  I have no idea whether it will get into the show, but I'm pleased with it and very much enjoyed the process.

I Like #278

 It's been a whirlwind week here.  My mom and I drove down to Houston to spend two days at the International Quilt Festival which as always was really inspiring.  I gave a lecture on my 3D work and led two tours of one of the SAQA exhibitions.  Mom and I had a lovely time walking through the quilts and booths and ended with sore feet and lots of inspiration. I didn't take very many pictures, but here are a few.

There was a whole exhibit of Zena Thorpes exquisite applique quilts that I loved.  Lots of her pieces were inspired by illuminated manuscripts which of course I love.  They're all quite big with the most amazin teeny-tiny turned edge applique.  This piece was inspired by the Book of Kells.

Bee Sewcial had a fantastic exhibit of their modern bee quilts, I think overall it was my favorite special exhibit at the show.  They led a walk-through and it was great to hear from all the quilters in the group and hear about their process.

Frank Klein, a major art quilt support and collector, had a show with selections from his collection at IQF.  Two favorites from that group were Pat Bishop's Owl

And Naomi Velazquez' 3D piece.  I loved the way she colored (dyed? painted?) the batting so that it becomes an integral part of the design.

There were tons of amazing quilts in the judged show, but one particular favorite was this hand appliqued, hand quilted piece by Japanese quilter Hideko Kawai.  I love all the fish and undersea creatures and I love that they all have little creatures appliqued inside them!

On Saturday afternoon we drove back to Dallas so we could spend Sunday with my sister celebrating her 40th birthday.  We had a wonderful day, playing games with the kids and hanging out, and then in the afternoon we played an (unlicensed) Harry Potter murder mystery game.  It was so fun,  we all had to dress up and act our characters and figure out who stole the philosopher's scone.  I was Luna Lovegood and Mom was Professor McGonagall.  It turned out Becky's friend who was playing Moaning Myrtle was the thief.  Everybody got really into it and we had lots of laughing.  Afterwards we had a birthday party for her and all in all it was a great day.

I also kept on with the catching-up-on-blogging this week, sharing a post about my second Ice phase diagram quilt.  Read more about it here.

I left Spooky with a house sitter while we were gone and took Blue to Becky's.  Unfortunately early Friday morning all three pups (Blue and Becky's two) were sprayed by a skunk really bad.  Becky and Andrew had to bathe all three multiple times which is such an awful task, especially with Blue who just hates baths.  He's still a little stinky, but she really got most of it out.

It's such a special thing to be able to spend time with my family.  I'm always so grateful for the opportunity.  Coming back early Monday meant that this week at work has been crazy, but I'll be home this weekend (mostly) so hopefully I can get caught up a bit.  Hoping you have all had good things this week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

New Quilt: Ice 2

 Last week I shared a couple of posts about a new quilt I made based on the phase diagram for ice.  I mentioned that I'd cut out the crystal structures on my silhouette cutter and of course, when you do that, there's always the inside and the outside.  I wound up using the "inside" or "negatives" for the first quilt (below), but I saved the "outside" or "positives" (second picture) for a second piece!

in the original piece the background was a solid piece of white, but for this one I fused the blue/green crystal pieces down onto a variety of purple and brown fabrics from my stash and then pieced them together.  I love all the extra visual interest that comes from having multiple colors of background fabrics.  And it's also interesting to see how different some of the cute pieces look on these backgrounds vs. the ones above. 

As always I quilted in lots of fun colors- I love using bright and contrasting threads in my quilting. As in the prior piece the edges of the crystal sections didn't come together perfectly so I couched down some wonderful fuzzy purple yarn between sections.  It's the same yarn I used to finish the edges and I think serves to bring the whole thing together.  The yarn is actually a recent addition to my stash, my friend Gail de-stashed it into my collection when she saw me in Santa Fe.  I guess I seemed like someone who needed fuzzy purple yarn and I can attest that that is true!  Thanks Gail!

I was initially going for a color scheme of purple and blue, but lots of the cut crystal shapes trended more toward gray or gray green,  and many of the purple fabrics in my stash trended toward brown.  The resulting color scheme is a little non-traditional, but I think it's interesting and I like it even more than the first white/blue one.

I really enjoyed being able to make two pieces with the same cut fabric and not having to waste all the leftovers that come off the silhouette.  I have several bins of little bits of fusible backed fabric that resulted from that and it's so nice to use 100% of the cutting material sometimes!  

I Like #277

 Welcome to another week of things to like.  We had lovely fall weather this week, a little rain, a little cool, but not cold yet.  

Our prompt from LeeAnna this week is our favorite pumpkin baked goods.  I love baking with pumpkin, and I like every pumpkin baked good I've ever had except pumpkin pie (I'm just not crazy about the texture.  I think I my favorite recipe is for pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

I like catching up on blogging!  I blogged this week about a quilt I finished this summer based on the phase diagram for ice.  You can read more about it here and here.

I broke one of my favorite pottery cups this week-it was really sad, it was one of the last pieces I had from a glaze my mom used only very very early in her career (the brown with the dark brown spots).  I decided to make some earrings out of some of the broken shards.  Not as nice as having my cup, but better than nothing.  And I love stash-using-crafts.

The pups looking adorable on the sofa.  Unfortunately, Spooky has been on a sofa-eating rampage this week.

We're doing a [non-licensed] Harry Potter mystery game for my sister's birthday, so I made some happy Harry Potter witch hats for my sister's friend Katie and my mom who didn't have any yet.  I like doing small fun stash-crafts.

The flowers are still blooming which makes me very happy.  Unfortunately I have a wretched infestation of cucumber beetles (green with the black spots on the yellow dahlia below) and they are just eating holes in all the flower petals.

Wishing everyone a good week, and don't forget to vote next Tuesday! Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!