Washing To Do

A big stack of to-be-washed fabrics.  Monthly batik packs from eQuilter and random purchases over the last year.  I try to wash my fabrics as I buy them, just works better for me, knowing everything is already washed.  I think I've been putting this off because it will be a lot of ironing, but the stack is taunting me, I want to use this stuff!

I Find It Trying

This December 8th daily collage or sketch came about because I was playing with the Tangoes that were on my worktable for some unknown reason.  Have you ever played this game?  Really challenging! I traced each plastic shape in each color of fine tip Sharpie that I had (black, blue, green, red) then filled in with color pencil.  Wanted to see what the overlapping would look like.  The words say 

I Find It Trying Being A Square Among Triangles And Parallelograms

The December 9th daily collage, magazine pictures and words along with colored pencil.  Words say: Power Explodes When You Need It Most

Round Robin In A Day

First quilt finished of 2012! This is from a CQFA workshop called Round Robin In A Day.  We each started out with a small piece (the center windmill-ish square) and it gets added to and passed on several times.

 Quick, improvisational and no pressure, the whole room just explodes in creativity as everyone rises to the challenge.  Such a fun activity.  This is what the piece looked like before the quilting.

 Some closeups of the embroidery stitches I stitched on each seam, I used a lot of the ones on my machine, but not all.

We just did this activity again at our January CQFA meeting, so I'll post about that another time!

Imaginary Landscapes

 This time it was a pen and watercolor crayons in the daily practice journal.  The words in the binding say:  Imaginary Landscapes Draw Me In Every Time.

December 7th just magazine words this time and some pen marking.  Words in the binding are: 

You Know You Do.

Square Fabric Bowl

 A fabric bowl that I finished and gave away as a Christmas present this year.

 It was pretty easy to make and is a nice showcase for cool fabrics.  Timtex was used as the interfacing and the fabrics were fused to it before sewing it together.  This was started in a CQFA workshop a while ago.

 You can see how differently shaped it could be, depending on how high you sew up the seams.

I think I'd like to try to make another one in a different shape at some point.

Gather Gather

 Gather Gather - the daily collage from December 4th consisting of a magazine picture of a bee, paint sample strip, selvedge edge numbers, stamped words, blue tissue paper.
Words in the binding are: Oh! To Have Such A Purpose!

A little surrealism for the December 5th collage.  A magazine picture of a chicken foot and a kudzu covered structure, colored pencil and magazine words ALIEN INVADERS.  Words in the binding are: 

Aliens have to come from somewhere.  What do aliens call home?

What Do you do when your fortune isn't for you?

Another of my daily collages from December, this from December 3rd.  The power was still out, so I had my battery powered lamp on, and my little mp3 player for music, and my messy desktop for inspiration.

We had purchased some nicely bagged tea from Rivendell in Santa Cruz, and this was the front of the bag which had interesting stamps of horses and Chinese writing as well as the name of the tea (which was quite yummy).  Pen and colored pencil drawings, along with a fortune cookie fortune (You love sports, horses and gambling but not to excess.) Painted paper and rice paper too.  

The words in the binding are: What do you do when your fortune isn't for you?

Hello! How are you doing?

"Hello! How are you doing?"  I found those words in a magazine advertisement, how could I not use them to make a card? They're collaged along with colored rice or mulberry paper, ink from a stamp pad, and a paper lace border.

Collage Practice In The Dark

 For my birthday way back in the start of December I decided to start a collage a day practice.  And I was stubborn enough to actually do it even though the power was out due to a massive windstorm. As my motto goes "Do It Anyways"

 I used my new visual journal, which is a spiral sketchbook thing with bristol paper, nice and heavy and takes watercolor and glue really well.

 First collage done via candlelight, no flash.

 First collage with flash.  The presss here circle is heat sensitive mood ring stuff.
Words are: "DISCOVER the mysterious.  NO RIGHT NOW"

December 2nd collage.  Power was still out, this is a photo taking via headlamp which was how I was working.  Safer than candles, and brighter too.

Ancient's Eyes Are Always Open

New Favorite Dessert

New favorite after-dinner treat.  Pomegranate seeds on top of Honey Greek Yogurt.  Especially in my favorite cat bowl.  Ice cream no longer required.

Happy New Year!

 Heya Happy New Year!  Another long absence from blog-landia, whoops!  But there's several good reasons this time!  How about a kind of spur of the moment trip to China for the holidays?  Here's some pictures of our snowy freezing day on the Great Wall (Mutianyu).  The weirdest, steepest, twisty-est stairs I've ever been on, which were also icy and snow-covered.  Fun!

You can see all the funny angles of the brick work, nothing level, I found it disorienting when I was walking, but beautiful and interesting when I was standing still.  Zach, Marc and Alex.

 A picture of Marc and I. Wearing many many layers.  On one of the graffitied corners.

 We didn't get too many super long views because of the clouds, but the wall just goes on and on and then even further.

Another Zach and Alex picture with lots of the wall in the background.  It really is an impressive thing and I'm glad we got the chance to see it ourselves.

On Mo's Street

This is what late fall/early winter looks like in the San Francisco Bay Area.  At least on Maureen's street.

I got out of my car, gasped at the beauty and had to grab my camera to try and capture the gorgeousness. There's just something about that red-orange against the blue blue sky.

Finding Fabulous Freebies

 Here's some of the fun stuff from the freebie pile Bron brought to our last CQFA meeting from FabMo.  She always finds the most interesting stuff to bring to us and we all politely divide it up, there's never been any pinching or hitting or yelling, this is not Black Friday at Walmart after all.  I liked these four fabrics and thought it would be interesting to make two pieces one, green based and one red based, building around these as focuses with a lot of the other fabrics I've been collecting from Fabmo lately which are easily divisible into red vs. green.  I wonder sometimes what my brain is doing sometimes, I really do.  Why red and green? Who knows.  I couldn't tell you.  Maybe it will all become clear after I actually make the quilts!

 I liked this gold mum print a lot, the scale of it and the background fabric color.  I think it will make a great applique on something.

I'm going to hem up the floral embroidered fabric as napkins.  The stuff on the right is wallpaper samples,which is all bug paintings, the title of which cracked me up, Timorous Beasties.  Sounds so Gorey-esque huh?

All of a sudden it's time for Thanksgiving!  Can you believe it?  Are you ready?

And all of a sudden we're hosting the family, and some friends, all together 14 people if everyone comes.  Which is awesome, and I can't even express how much I'm looking forward to it, but it is going to take some doing to pull off.  Good thing my son Zach is coming home from college for the first time on Wednesday, (yay!), another set of hands that like cooking will be helpful.  

I've dug out my recipes, made my list, now to steel myself for a trip to the store tomorrow.

Here's some of what I'm making, I recommend  all these recipes, I've used them before in case you're looking for something yummy to try this year:

Artichoke Parmesan Sourdough Stuffing

Cranberry Orange Port Compote

Green Beans With Almonds and Shallots

One new thing I'm trying is Thanksgiving Star Cider, I have a feeling I'll be needing it...

We're also having plumbing issues (of course), and I have a big hole in the kitchen ceiling, lovely, so very very appetizing. 

 Hopefully this will go off better than the first time we ever hosted Thanksgiving when our stove element decided to go out in the middle of cooking the turkey.  Yes, we finished the whole thing by turning the broiler on and off every ten minutes for hours.  It actually turned out pretty well considering.  

In case you're looking for music for the holiday, you gotta check out the NPR All Songs Considered

  Songs for Stuffing Thanksgiving Mix.  It's awesome, and includes Alice's Restaurant naturally...

Hope if you're celebrating Thanksgiving this week it is filled with peace, joy and fabulous food.

So Very Close To Done

 Two years ago for my birthday, as my big gift, my dear husband agreed to help me make me the design wall I'd always wanted for my studio.  We went out and bought the insulation board, the wood trim and the flannel.  And then a bunch of stuff happened, blah,blah,blah, and all the stuff just sat there, propped up against the wall.  I used the insulation board as a photo background many times, but it wasn't the useful design wall I wanted and needed.  I continued using the back of a flannel-back picnic tablecloth tacked up on the wall as my "temporary" design wall.

Recently, he had a rare day off between his many trips back and forth to China and asked me what I wanted him to get done around the house before he had to leave again, and for once I was selfish and said, "let's actually make the design wall."  It involved a lot of outdoor sweeping out on the driveway to get the area clean enough to work with because I didn't want all that white flannel dirty from the start.  It really was a two person job handling the glue and getting the flannel down without lumps or folds.  I knew I couldn't have done it all by myself.  The spray glue worked really really well and we had just enough.  Originally I was going to cover both of the boards together, but we realized it wasn't going to work getting it back into the house so we did each one on it's own.  The flannel is affixed to the back with good ol' duct tape, and lots of it.

So as you can see it isn't really done, because it isn't affixed to the wall with the wood pieces.  We'd forgotten since so much time had passed that the two boards together are 1" too big for the wood to overlap enough at the corners to screw them to the wall.  So one of the panels needs to be trimmed down an inch along each edge and then we can finally put it up on the wall for real.  It still works pretty well as is just leaning there against the wall. Think it will be another two years? We shall see...

Unfortunately Zelda the WonderDog left a pawprint, she decided she had to investigate as we were moving around and I caught her just as she stepped onto one of the boards.  We'd been joking about the cats lying down on the spray-glued insulation boards and getting stuck, at least that didn't happen.  So now I have to decide whether to leave it as a memorial, or try and clean it off.  I think I'll keep it, it's not too dark, and it will be nice to have that reminder of her in my workroom.

Learning Photoshop Elements

 I finally got started with learning Photoshop Elements by taking a beginner's class geared for quilters at Always Quilting, it was taught by Lynn Koolish.  It was the perfect class for me, I got over my fear of using the program, finally figured out what layers are, and fooled around with a bunch of my pictures to get some really fun and different results.  Lynn was a great teacher, very prepared, very clear in her instructions to all the people in the class who were at very different levels.  I learned way more than I thought I would.  This program is really versatile and I was amazed at what you could do right away.

 A door in Port Townsend

Combining the door picture with the grapes.  This was one of my favorites, I think I'll make a t-shirt out of this image so I can wear it. 

 A silly one adding words to a picture of my dashboard, my digital readout has been spotty, especially when it is really hot in the car, I never know what parts of the numbers will show up.

 A pump from Vikingsholm in Lake Tahoe.

 With a zillion layers and some words that say: I Was Full In The Past

 A nut holding up our deck at home.

 Looks like a quilt design to me!

 I like this one even better.

 My hand on the river beach in Boulder Creek.

 HomeDepot plus J.R. Bob Dobbs was too hilarious to pass up taking a picture, remember Church of the SubGenius from the 80's?

I found that totally random pictures off my cell phone can end up making an interesting collage (at least to me!).  I think it is because the pictures I take with my cell phone are kind of like ripping out images from magazines that I like, so they go together in my brain somehow.  Anyways I like how this one turned out, a lot.  And yes that's an x-ray of my hip in there, hope it doesn't weird you out.

So will I use Photoshop Elements for the quilting or mixed-media art that I do? I would say yes, if anything for design inspiration, for a new way to collage, and also for things to print out on fabric to include in quilts.  There are a whole lot of possibilities...