Starting Sisters

I began my quilt for the Sister Artists exhibit today. Using the now-inked-up embroidered butterflies, I'm working on getting some fabric added around the colored part of the background.

 The first round of border strips, cut improvisational style of various widths.

And then the final, at least for now, borders.

I'll be joining these together with other blue fabrics for the background.

I tried to vary the fabrics I used except for two.

I'm pretty pleased with how I've started. Now to get the bird-y border started.

Sister Artists Butterfly

 
Time for me to start working on the Sister Artists piece I need to do.  I have received these really great hand-embroidered butterflies (and one bird) made by women artists in Uganda. They're all done on white or cream fabric, and I need either a blue or green background to make the quilt work that I want to make with them. The white is just too high contrast.

I started out with some sky blue Tsukineko ink all around the butterfly, the ink wicked up through the fabric pretty quickly. I added it a small distance away from the embroidery so that it didn't change the thread color too obviously.

Then I added some "orchid odyssey" aka lavender.

That mixed together pretty well for a nice sky effect so I put in a bit darker of blue with Cerulean blue.

Here's how it looks after it's dried overnight. I like the look of it much better now, it'll be so much easier to incorporate into a quilt without the glaring white background. And even better the ink didn't affect the embroidery threads.  Now to do the other embroidered pieces in a similar manner.

Wandering Wednesday - Tucson Botanical Gardens

 

We were back in Tucson over last weekend, and had an hour to spare before my second appointment in the medical trial I'm participating in, so off to the Tucson Botanical Gardens we went. It was a cold spell, with nights under 30F, so the cactuses had cups on them to protect them from freezing. It was honestly hard to take them seriously, if that makes sense.

The gardens were all decorated up for a night-time event they have which involves zillions of lights and various types of luminaries, I liked this spiky tree-ish version. 

This was the garden's cactus-y version of a Hanukkiah (a menorah used for celebrating Hanukkah).

The butterfly house was so warm and cozy, it steamed up my glasses. At one point a gigantic Blue Morph grazed my hand and nearly landed, so beautiful.

There were a lot of orchids in the butterfly house as well, which the butterflies love.

Cool re-use of glass bottle bottoms on a metal gate.

When the sun hits these just right, they just glow so brilliantly because of the white hairs on the cactus.

Absolutely!

So soft and cozy, don't you want to pet it? 

These flower-bud shapes remind me of pine cones with the overlapping shapes.

This Victoria Agave was a show-stopper, that brilliant white edging on each leaf was a real wow!

Granite Butterfly

I rescued this butterfly from a probable death-by-squishing, removing it from the middle of the trail in Yosemite.

Looks much happier and safer on the granite. How do you like the pattern on the wings compared to the granite flecks?

Up On The Roof, Again

Another recent field trip was going up to the California Academy of Sciences with my parents, this time my husband was able to come with us, so he got to see what we've been raving about for almost a year now. Here are the boys with my mom and dad up on the living roof. There was a lot to see even though we'd already visited once. Plus, this is the kind of place that I could come back to again and again because *the place itself is so worth visiting, just to be there.* I can't think of too many other places like that, well Yosemite of course, but you hopefully get what I mean.

One of the first things Alex noticed was that the atrium roof looked very different. "Mom isn't that duct tape up there?" I thought, no it couldn't be, duct tape all over the roof of this sparkling new amazing building.Well, since my husband is of course quite the duct tape aficionado and connoisseur he had to ask and the answer was truly surprising. It turns out that they were having to re-caulk the seams of all those ceiling window pieces and the duct tape was to hold the pieces together while the caulking took time to set up and cure correctly. How about that? I don't know why that is so cool to know about, but somehow I just love that something so prosaic and useful around the house as duct tape is used by this state-of-the-art ecologically marvelous museum too.It really made for a different look for that ceiling like train tracks or antennas or something. I wonder how the heck they are going to get it all off and clean off the sticky goo left behind. That will be quite the project!

And oh why not, how about one more butterfly picture?