February Cornucopia

 

A picture of my blooming Lenten Rose. The flowers point downwards, so you have to pick them up to see their lovely faces. Just like so many other things...and people sometimes. Here's the cornucopia post for February, it's all links. Links to things I read, watched, listened to online and thought they were worth sharing and/or remembering. Enjoy!

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"Gluesticks are my Xanax." CNN covers "junk journaling." Love to see it.

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In an effort to get out of the Amazon universe, I switched over to The Storygraph to track my reading. It easily imported my many many years of GoodReads data. It's a lovely interface (with no ads!) and I really like using it. You can find me here.

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Another new fibre arts podcast to check out, from Fibre Artists Take Two, Friday Feature Artist. They also have these and more interviews on their YouTube channel.

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Do you have an account on the Internet Archive? I don't know why, but I've never really utilized this amazing resource, but they have everything on there, for free. Like this beautiful book on drawing from 1916. Just in case either your public or private library doesn't have such a thing to use...

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Here's another interesting "color of the year" predictor over on Pinterest. I like this color palette A Lot.

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I'm liking the new photo sharing app, Flashes For Bluesky, introduced recently that looks and functions like Instagram without the algorithm, and it links up to cross post with your BlueSky account if you want it to. If you've used Instagram, you'll know how to use it.

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I've also been using PixelFed, another photo sharing app which is non-Meta or X/twitter affiliated. I've been posting out and about nature or built environment pictures. It reminds me of a cross between Instagram and Flickr.

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KaleidaCam is one of my favorite photo apps, I play with it all the time, and I just bought a 99¢ add-on pack for a couple more options and I'm re-intrigued all over again. A cheap date I am, yes indeed.

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Books I've listened to or read on Libby this month, I'd recommend them all:

1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - the voice acting by Simon Slater on this one was very well done
2. Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch - another great Rivers of London story
3. Fourteen Days - Margaret Atwood and 35 other authors weave a beautiful tale set in an apartment building in NYC during Covid lockdown.
4. The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead - devastating and beautifully told
5. The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource - Chris Hayes
6. What Abigail Did That Summer - Ben Aaronovitch - a different main character in a Rivers of London story
7. The Furthest Station - Ben Aaronovitch - a short one for this series but I'm a completionist
8. The Man Who Died Twice - Richard Osman - I think I liked this one even more than the first in the Thursday Murder Club series
9. System Collapse - Martha Wells - and now I'm sad that I've read all of the MurderBot Diaries so far

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StoryGraph is really working out well for me as an alternative (ie non-Amazon related) to GoodReads. 

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Good essay from Rebecca Solnit about blame shifting.

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I love anything Wizard of Oz related, so this was super interesting, The Feminist Who Inspired the Witches of Oz.

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We are admitted Costco-Maniacs around here, so I enjoyed this podcast episode of Acquired about The Complete History and Strategy of Costco.

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A wonderful short story by Premee Mohamed, Everyone Keeps Saying Probably.

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Sour Grace

 

After working on the design with colored pencil sketches and paper cutouts, it's time for fabric (yay!). The orange will be the 10 stamens in the flower center, the purple will be the background.

Using fusible stabilizer to make pattern pieces, and drawing the lines with a micron pen. Apparently other pen ink can sometimes migrate to the front of the fabric and show up unexpectedly.

Lots of leaves.

Here's how the leaves are looking.

It was really sunny out so I did some weeding of my deck planters and found many Sour Grass plants thriving. They got dug out and washed off and brought up to my workroom.

There really are quite a lot of leaves for each stem so having that many leaves at the bottom of the design feel right to me. I also need to add in something to represent the many buds below the open flower somehow.

Here's how it's looking so far, with a new trick I learned in class- cropping your design with toilet paper. Turns out it really works and is quite easy to do.

Class Flowers

 

I'm taking a class with Jane Sassaman this month working on Abstracting From Nature. I've always really enjoyed her quilts and have been lucky to see some in person. They're all exquisitely created and so well designed. It's been very fun being in class learning from her.

For the class we had to chose a flower or plant to work with, I chose Sour Grass (aka Oxalis). Sure they're weeds, and invasive ones at that where I live, but I love them. These pictures were taken in my parent's backyard last week.

Not really clover, but the leaves look very clover-ish. Always three heart shaped leaves.

After a whole lot of sketches and studies using Jane's great class structure, I came up with this design. The rectangle will be the edge of the quilt. I think the title will be "Sour Grass Grace".

Using some colored paper I played with the shapes on the design wall.

Pinterest redux

 I've renewed my Pinterest habit just recently. This is all thanks to the great class I'm taking with Jane Sassaman, as she shared a Pinterest board of hers that has a great selection of design plates that was very helpful for the class assignment. But it got me back into looking at the site a bit more regularly. 

Boy oh boy are there ever A Lot of advertisements on there now. But there's still cool stuff to check out and put on boards. 

I started one that's kind of personal, I called it Julie Core. It's the most "me" stuff to me, so it might not make any sense at all to someone else. Even someone who knows me. Whatever resonates as oh yes that's a "me thing" goes on there. It's fun to look at and see if I'm still vibing with the images. 

Pinterest is one of those social media sites I never really "got", never understood exactly what it was for. Sharing images, sure okay, marketing stuff--I guess? It's just an interesting combination of instagram, and Flickr with a pretty good algorithm. It's way too easy to spend too much time on there though. Maybe that's why I didn't stick with using it?

FOMO fabric

Okay, so there was one more fabric purchase that happened this month, and it's all because of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). The collaboration between one of my favorite fabric designers and colorists ever, Kaffe Fasset and the historical traditional designs of William Morris was too much to resist. I couldn't bring myself to buy one of absolutely everything, so instead I got a jelly roll and two color ways of my favorite Morris design, Acanthus.

Now to find a really good jelly roll pattern that shows off the entire strip instead of chopping it up a lot. Maybe I'll just do the Jelly Roll Race pattern? Now that I've seen these in person, I'm confirmed in my opinion that Tula Pink's designs are really reminiscent of William Morris. Very wonderful in these vibrant colors.

There was also this speckled Ruby Star Society print in a beautiful dark grey that was on big sale. Now that I see them all together, maybe this is the combination I'll end up using for a quilt. My new fabric tracker for the year is getting some use this month both on the fabric in and the fabric out.
 

Snake in the Hand

 

Sitting in the hospital for days, I finally worked on one of the hand projects that I brought along with me, Snake in the Garden.

We were in a room with a nice big window, so there was good light to work with for most of the day.

I think I'll always remember stitching on this piece as I kept watch over my dad.

A Hard Week

 

It's been a hard, hard week. My dad passed away on Friday the 14th, on his fifth day in the hospital. He unfortunately had some falls at home and hit his head causing a brain bleed. It all went downhill very fast from there and he died peacefully after receiving two and half days of "comfort care." My mother and I were there all day every day, most of the time together which was a sort of comfort care for us, to get to witness his last transition together. My DH and DD were able to come, and then my brother joined us for the last three days. It was a great blessing that my mom, brother and I all happened to be there together in the room when he took his final breath. We found it to be a true relief that he wouldn't have to continue to suffer unnecessarily. 

Now for getting all of us through all of the aftermath.

The picture above was the pavement in the hospital parking garage after one of the rainstorms last week. It kind of sums up the whole week for me. I'll write more about my dad at some point, and hopefully I'll be able to get back to some creative work soon.

Granny Squares?

 

I saw this great idea for making a crocheted granny square for each book that one reads during the year based on the colors in each book cover. This would take a whole lot more colors of yarn than I will ever have on hand (and I'm Not Buying Yarn) and a whole lot more crocheting skill than I currently have. But the idea of it got me thinking, wouldn't it be fun to do a quilt block for each book you read per year?  There's got to be a whole lot of crossover between quilters and readers, right? Or maybe it's just the quilters that I happen to know? Anyways—I am a quilter who really likes reading, so I'm going to work on this project and see if I can get it going for this year. I've already read 12 books so I'm already behind.

This got me thinking, are there any quilt blocks that look like granny squares? I found this one, and this free one. but they don't really come off visually as a granny square to me. They're lacking the laciness of the patterns I think, too block-y (hah!).  This one is much more of a crocheted look, but doesn't appeal to me at all as a block making experience. And certainly not for the number of blocks I'd be making.

This sort of variation of color placements and arrangements from block to block works a bit better when you have them all together in a quilt. After checking out that one version of a quilt block based on granny squares, I realized I had just one version of granny squares stuck in my mind. That meant looking into what exactly are crocheted granny squares? Turns out that they are not just several rounds of color around a central square, there are a whole lot of variations out there. (hey just like quilt blocks!) Interpreting that wide variation in quilt blocks would make for an even more interesting quilt imo.

I got a digital magazine out of the library and started sketching on my iPad inspired by the pictures. I didn't spend time trying to interpret the look of the crocheted squares into quilt blocks that would be able to be pieced (piece-able?). Just getting the idea of the blocks down. I think it could work as an overall project if you used the same fabric as the negative space or openings in the crochet.

Then I went into EQ8 to see if there were any blocks available that would substitute. As you can see I got just a little carried away with my choices. I was going for variety here. Most of these blocks are way beyond my piecing capabilities, this is just for fun. The one block at the bottom that I repeated and filled in with seemed like a really good crochet looking block, when several were put together. I think a combination of circular, diamond, and square/mosaic types of blocks could work out really well to get that Granny Square Sampler look. Or I could just do a bullseye block, and vary the number, size, and shape of the rounds. hmmmm so many options—more thinking on this is required.

Color of the Year and More

 

Here's a catch-up post on new stuff I've bought this year so far. I was shopping at Hartland Quilt shop on Etsy buying supplies for the Jane Sassaman class I'm taking this month, Golden Threads quilting paper and I also bought a half yard of 

this really interesting butterfly fabric by Faye Guaniper from Dear Stella. For the class I also had to get a pretty big quantity of Pellon interfacing, so I bought it from Amazon along with another fusible Hobbs 80/20 batting. Not worth a picture on those two items. I'll let you know about using this quilting paper stuff after the class, it looks pretty interesting.

My pre-order of the Kona color of the year, Nocturne arrived from Keepsake Quilting. I got three yards of it and I love love love this purple. It's a really beautiful, rich color.

Mx. Domestic has an online shop and they announced a great sale so I snapped up this assortment of fat quarters from the fairly new fabric line, Scrawl by Giucy Juice. 

I love all the print and fonts as well as the colors which will play well with the Alison Glass fabrics I have left over from the Trinket quilt.

To support this great and very inclusive store in Washington, Wyldwood Creative, I did a little browsing on their website. This looks like such a fun local quilt (and more) shop. I'd seen this Art Gallery Fabrics binding fabric in a couple of other fabric shops but hadn't bought any, but this color way was interesting to me. I think it might be usable as is, I really like the dashed cutting line and scissors. They also had this really pretty checkered ribbon, it has a lovely hand, very soft. And their sticker selection was pretty awesome, yes that's a banana slug sticker. The two shiny holographic stickers do not photograph well, but they look cool in person.

I saw this embroidery project when friend Jaye and I visited Cheryl in Oregon, she'd finished all these ladies and it was so wonderful. I want to try it, so I bought the little kit and book that Brooklyn Haberdashery sells. Just a note, I want to make the ladies that I embroider of more diverse body types. This cellulose PFD fabric looked very interesting and it is very very smooth, I can't wait to try and dye it to see how it works out.

And lastly, I bought myself the Victoria Findley Wolfe book, The Quilting Experience. It's really beautiful, I haven't read it all yet, but the pictures are great.

Yikes, that was a whole lot of shopping, hopefully that's out of my system for now. Inspired by friend Jaye, my newly created Fabric Usage Tracker worksheet is getting a real workout. With my two quilt finishes, I'm currently in "the red" by 5.25 yards. As in, I've bought more fabric than I've used. Not a surprise given all this shopping! Okay, back to working on using some more of said fabric up.

Red Geese

Now for something different. At Sew Day last weekend I was able to sew the red Flying Geese units I had previously cutout last month for one of the clues for the Old Town Mystery. Wow, these are so fun all in one place! I think the variety in background fabrics works, and I got some good variation in the red tones.

If I had to choose, these are my two favorites combinations.

The snippings left over from trimming all of these.
 

Our Mistake

I had a lot of help from one of my studio assistants getting the facings, sleeve and label hand-sewn onto the Our Mistake I was finishing for Stretching Art & Tradition. 

Korben was really on alert and we had a little fight about who got to use the needle (eek!)

 Here's the final look at the whole quilt with the facings stitched down.

I like the look of this view of the bottom part of the quilt, it looks like a scenic postcard to me.

And a close up of the boat being dissolved in the acid lake.

The word window picture frame worked out as I was hoping. The title and the words in the window come from an essay written after the November election by Rebecca Solnit.

All four of the corners cooperated for once.

As per usual I looked up the ever so helpful Jeri Riggs facing method page for assistance.

And now it's off in the mail winging its way across the country in time  to be in the 25th Stretching Art & Tradition exhibit at the Mancuso show - Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival in Virginia. 

Sky Structure

Oops, I meant to post about this yesterday, but in some good news, I finished "Sky Structure" for the Sister Artists exhibit. 

We got 5" of rain and the power went out not once but twice, but I was hunkered down inside doing my hand sewing so it was just fine. I was glad I didn't need to be ironing.

I think I'm going to miss these lovely embroideries.

They're so cheery and lively.

I hope that this quilt and all the others in The Advocacy Project exhibit raises money and awareness for this very worthy project.

On the label, I credited the names of my sister artists who did the lovely embroideries, Judith Adong and Stella Grace Awor from Uganda. 

And then I moved on to sewing down the facings on the quilt for Stretching Art & Tradition. Almost there. I'll be mailing them out today.