New Year's Sunset

How about a Sunday Sunset?

This is taken from Wilder Ranch in Santa Cruz last week on our New Year's Day hike.

Finally A Pillowcase!

One of the few things I managed to actual make this year as holiday gifts, a pillowcase!  This was a kit that I bought at one of the local stores.  I had lots of directions for pillowcase making already, but had never gotten around to doing one, and this elephant fabric was just too hard to resist.The directions weren't the clearest in the world (at least to me), and I'm not all that great at 3-D visualizing, so it took a while to figure out.  But after re-pinning several times at last I had it and it was quite a nice trick the way it all turns out.  All the seams contained so no raveling to worry about.
 And my niece seemed to like it which was the whole point after all.
This is a good video that shows all the steps which I wish I'd searched out, it would have been helpful!

Working On Windmills

Working on Windmills again, (be nice, I could certainly be Tilting at Windmills here, in fact that will be my title the next time I talk about this project.).
I've been laying all these out, trying different combinations of dark/light, prints/colors, etc. Not sure the pattern interplay between the blocks comes out very well using all prints together like this, so I might have to end up cutting hand-dyed solids to go with all the prints.  I think the blocks that have prints with close-to-solids read much better.  But I probably need to lay out even more to see what the overall effect is with a bigger selection.
So hmmmm.
More thinking about this one is in order.  I don't want to go to all the work of piecing this thing and not even be able to see the pattern you know?  So it might be a matter of laying this out very carefully instead of sewing it all randomly together (which is of course my first and admittedly lazy instinct).  What do you think?

ATC's Again

 I was putting these away and realized I hadn't posted them here, from the CQFA September 2012 meeting, three more ATC's for my collection.  I skipped doing them in November, so I'm working on some for our January meeting this coming Saturday.

Nancy Riffle  Dolores Miller.

 Rhonda Ludwico, this one is a little envelope that has a folded paper inside and is hand-stitched.

Happy Happy New Year!

2012 is gone and 2013 is here.  Now what?  After quite a long blogging hiatus, unintentional and unplanned of course,  I'm getting back to it, so here I am.  There will be more art made this year, 2012 was quite a year of fallowness for me.  Not a whole lot got done, and I felt stymied and uninspired to create.  The blockage was created out of many things, and I picked the knot apart all the past year and figured my way out of the mess. 

At least I think so.

The picture above is a detail of a small rug that my husband brought back from a recent trip to India.  I believe it is probably intended to be a prayer rug because of the size, and it feels like silk.  We are not going to put it on the floor, because it would get ruined immediately.  Instead I plan to hang it on the wall.  The colors are intense and the design is lovely, I see something new every time I look at it.

A couple years ago I did a weekly six-word memoir quiltlet, and that was a really useful and inspiring exercise.  This year I am going to do a daily one. Daily, because I need to get back into the daily art making process.  That's what it all comes down to for me, the art doesn't happen unless I'm in the studio.
Many other quilt artists pick a size for projects like this and then stick with it all year, but I know myself and I just can't bring myself to put constraints like that on such a project.  I am going to start out trying a 9x9" shape and see how it goes, if I like it, then I'll stick with it until I don't.  Hey, it's for me right?  The only rules are that there are to be 9 words somewhere on it, including on the back.  Because I found with the six-word project, that sometimes the words don't need to be seen.    I'll be posting those here in groups of three. Yes, you're right, it's all multiples of three.

New Year's Day has such a different feel than any other of the whole year.  Anticipation of what's to come is high, there's freshness and newness that is unlike any other day.  It just feels more momentous somehow, the things I choose to do today, as if they'll echo throughout the year coloring it all with the intention and focus I bring to what I create.  So I'm choosing to make some art, make some good food, go for a good walk, those sorts of things.  I hope and wish for you a wonderful year ahead, may we all have good fortune, abundant health, and joyful inspiration.