Bubble Wrap® Appreciation Day

Happy Bubble Wrap Day!!
According to the Bubble Wrap Personality Test I am a: Stomp-Popper Extroverted, Self-Motivated - You like interesting and varied work and are not afraid to take risks. You are ambitious and eager to play an active role in events. More than likely you will have an aggressive career as a professional wrestler or stunt person.
Well way back when, I used to race cars!! I actually sold my Porsche and bought my sewing machine.

Still Untitled Pigs.

Pig Strips are now painted. I'm liking this better now. The strips were painted with metallic acrylic paints, gold, blue, and green all kinda mushed up together. Now onto the embellishing. Beads, and ? We shall see what I come up with. No title yet, but there is a good storyline in my mind about these pigs and what they are doing. It will come from that I imagine.

Eye Spy Hexagons

Eye Spy a bunch of 4" hexagons. These are for Jaye who is planning to make a quilt for her son. She gave me a Come Quilt With Me template in this size, so I would cut some out for her. She sends me Tumblers, I send her Hexagons. A nice way for us to do these charm type quilts out of our fabric stashes. I still have several conversational boxes of fabrics to go through to get all the bugs and frogs and other things that kids like. Oh, this is actually a set of templates with a triangle so that it is easier to sew together in rows. Sewing together hexagons is a bit fiddly. But Jaye is cutting those out in I don't know what color. Maybe I should do an Eye Spy quilt too and cut double. Hmmm, who needs a quilt? My boys already complain about "too many" quilts on their beds (heehee).

Tumbler Project

At the same time as I was cutting the squares for the Feeling Blue project, I also cut out Tumbler pieces using the Come Quilt With Me plastic template. Jaye bought one too, so she sends me Tumbler pieces every now and then, when I put them together in a strip they look like this:

Feeling Blue

I spent a few hours getting the 8" squares cut and folded in quarters, ironed and ready to put on the 10" blue backgrounds. 36 of them from Jaye, then when I'm done sewing on the 8" squares, they go to Adrienne for her to apply 6" squares, then back to Jaye for 4" squares, she'll cut them in quarters and we each get the equivalent of 12 blocks, 48 pieces, 144 total. We each started with 36 blue background squares, so there will be a lot to play with at the end of this swap. This is for a new bullseye project. Last year it was "Seeing Red". This year it is "Feeling Blue" I love working with Jaye and Adrienne on these, they both have great fabric stashes, and wonderful color sense.

Quilted, now what?

Most of the quilting done. You can really see the piggy spiral here. I added on the little hearts that were sprinkled on the original fabric. It seems that the right facing pigs and the left facing pigs were separated for a long time, and now they come together. What a love story. Or perhaps it is a Sneetches story? Stars on thars and all? The hearts, even though teeny tiny eentsy teentsy were EZ, since they were already fused. I love EZ. Now onto painting the pigstrips so that their hideousness doesn't split the marching pigs up again. Hopefully I'll dream of the title tonight, and hopefully I will NOT have nightmares about pigs.

Cavorting Pigs

I woke up with these cavorting pigs on the brain (what a way to wake up, thanks a lot Frank!). I had an image of them massed in a couple of big groups, like a crowd of pigs waiting for something to *happen*. So with the assistance of some WonderUnder, now they are marching to my direction instead of higgeldy-piggedly(hah!). The other fabrics are scraps I found in the boxI just got from my friend Kay who moved recently and decided she doesn't need fabric in her life (she's a ceramic artist, but still, can you imagine a life without fabric!Heehee!). I love working with other people's scraps and making them work in my stuff. The purple moon is stuffed a bit, and it will be definitely be beaded with silvery beads. The dark green bit at the top used to be a curtain tieback I think, it has grommets on either end, which will require some kind of enhancing and embellishing of course, maybe tassels? Now I move onto the quilting! And then painting of the pigstrips. The challenge is that the fabric be 20% of the top. I think I'm over that.

Rip it Up!

What to do with this ugly fabric? Now this is a challenge! My first act upon this hideousness is to: Rip it up into strips. With the end goal of painting these pieces so that the pigs aren't quite so *there* and in-your-face-hey-I'm-cute! Here they are on top of one of my hand-dyes which will serve as background.

Ugly Fabricses

Eeeeek its the ugly fabric challenge from Frank, run away! 

Crazy for Rockets

Zach is Crazy for his Camera Rocket 

Alex and the Golden Rocket 

Wigwam Burner

Interesting structure, at the San Lorenzo Lumber yard in Felton (near the Roaring Camp steam train and Henry Cowell State Park.) Known as the "wigwam burner", it was used to efficiently burn up all the sawdust produced by the redwood mill in the "old days".

Dangerous Climbing

Marc Climbing up the rickety, rusty structure. Eeek! 

Rockets Away!

Rockets Away! Crisscrossing contrails. 

To the Rescue

Marc climbs up to the top of the "wigwam",to rescue Alex's golden rocket which went slightly askew on its first voyage into the blue yonder. 

Mr.B's Bag

The Mr.B's Fat Quarterly came this week and it had these fabrics and a sheet on how to make a Bag with them. This is a yearly subscription from Benartex, they send these quarterly or something. Not my kind of fabrics, but I thought I'd give making a bag a whirl. Anyways, these were the absolutely worst directions for anything I've ever made. Really bad. Who knows if I did it right? I don't care really, but I kinda like it. It has pocketses inside. I need to make a closure thingie for it though.

Go Bears!

Go Bears! Blocks for a Cal (UC Berkeley) quilt I'm making for a certain someone (shhhh it's a secret!). 

A Calendar Started

Beginnings of calendar piece maybe for the Quilting Arts calendar?? I find it hard to work a landscape in a square sometimes. Hey at least I'm working on something, right!! 

When Are You Gonna Die?

Ok, so Dara wanted me to find out when I'm gonna die according to this silly test. And gulp, I only have 31 years left to blog! Yikes!



This seems too soon to me, but who knows, right?
Better get my sewing and quilting projects done!
Like all of these above!

Tsunami Quilt Blocks and more

From Sharon B's blog, In a Minute ago there is a donate-a-quilt-block effort going on, go here to find out more, I'll post mine when I get it done. A 6" block, surely you have time for that?!

And I had to check on my nerdiness score thanks to Melanie Testa, I was surprised that I scored so high! So what's yours?

Blue Sky Again!

Thank goodness for that! All that grey sky was
getting me down. When the sun comes out and
all the wet wet wet ground starts steaming, you
know the weather has taken a turn for the better.

Sheela-na-Gig

Here's Sheela-na-gig, done done done and on her merry way to tell her story in the Myths and Legends show....

Website Renewal

Wellll, it had been a long while since I'd updated my sadly neglected website so I worked on that a bit today. Had to put a link to this blog after all!
But first I got distracted by an email in a journalling group about polaroid film transfers, and I remembered I have an old polaroid camera somewhere in the closet, so I had to of course instantly drop everything and go see if my camera would do the transfers or not. Well, after some experimentation I discovered that the answer to that is an emphatic and rather smelly no. Oh well, but I did get some cool textures to use in the next altered book that I work in.

Then I remembered that the Daily Show was on at 10am and I'd missed it last night, so I decided to actually turn on the tv during the day. Usually verboten for me! And as I was sitting down in my comfy chair, I realized I was about to sit upon my sewing kit and a quilt. That would have been a rather pointed reminder to watch where you land your arse. Oh yeah, I need to get the sleeve on my Sheela-na-gig quilt to send to the Myths and Legends show. Eeeek. So that was a good thing to do while I watched the antics on the snarkiest show on TV. Then all of a sudden it is time to go play bus driver and go to the post office to mail the quilt off to collect its well-deserved accolades, recognition in lieu of fame and fortune.

Strange Symbols

I painted this card a while ago. This symbol, I don't know where it came from, but I keep doodling it all the time? Kinda like a crop circle in my brain....What does it look like to you? 

Teeny Tiny and MADRR

Teeny Tiny MADRR book plus my fingers, you can tell how teeny it is, this is Rachel's book on the way to Marion all the way round the world... 

Wisdom in an Altered Book

A detail of an altered book I worked in over December, it is on its way to Pamela in Canada to get worked over. Hope that kerris likes it when it comes back to him.  

Starry Row

Round Row Robin for CQFA, my theme is celestial bodies, so stars, starry type fabrics or??? We'll see what I get back at the end, that is what is always fun with these kind of round robins. And I made some new-to-me blocks which is always good for me.