CREATE-ing

I've settled back into working on my little CREATE piece. When I left it last, I had added some leaves, but they were out of proportion to the rest of the piece. These leaves are too small...



So, I made a whole pile of bigger leaves, pulled off the tiny ones and played around adding more and bigger leaves. It's looking much better now.



The biggest surprise about going back to this piece is how great it feels to do hand applique again. I've been futzing around with fusibles and raw edge techniques looking for instant gratification, but those techniques aren't as satisfying to me as hand applique. And they generally don't produce the look I want. And I'm actually pretty quick at needleturning. So by the time I fuss around trying to make the other techniques look the way I want them to (and all-too-frequently give up in frustration) I might as well have done it by hand. Hand applique is my thing. It's what I do. I REALLY LIKE doing it. So why the heck haven't I been doing it? Sheesh.

Spring?

Don't be fooled by the appearance of sunshine...it was REALLY COLD when I took this picture. I found most of these little buckets and baskets at the dollar store. Soon I'll get busy with the drill and turn them into flower pots. If it ever gets warm enough to plant flowers, that is. Most everything in the garden is leafing out and a few brave little pansies have bloomed, but it's been too cold and wet and gloomy to do much out there. So I dug my all my bright little buckets out and put them on the porch to cheer myself up. Must. Have. Color.

Speaking of cold, it SNOWED Saturday at AshLee's track meet. Big huge snowflakes. It was completely inappropriate. Dave and I joke about sitting at track meets for 4 hours to watch Ash run for 3 minutes but it was no joke Saturday as we spent most of that 4+ hours in the car trying to stay warm and dry and only jumped out when her races were about to start.

Not much sewing going on here. My thumb is sore from gardening during the approximately 2 hours of halfway decent weather we had last week. And my checkerboard pieces had technical difficulties. And I'm still fretting a bit with what-to-do-next-itis. I can feel myself slipping into that pining for the elusive Best Quilt Ever. The thing where everything I'm working on has lost its attraction but I can't figure out what to do instead. Ugh.

Potluck

You know, where you load your plate up with bits of this and that...

1. So, the one time in the last oh, 10 years that I left the house with nothing to either read or sew just HAPPENS to be the night Dave gets severe vertigo and we have to go to the emergency room. Don't worry, he's fine, they ran a million tests to prove it. It's just the inner ear leftovers from that nasty virus he got in Canada. Anyway, do you know how BORING it is to sit in the emergency room for 3 hours? Oh yeah, I had my iPod, but hey, I was just going to listen to it in the car so I didn't bother to bring headphones. Aaack!

2. The special cat torture otherwise known as the yearly checkup is now over for another year and as usual, the little cat is disgustingly healthy, aside from being a big whiner. You'd think riding in the car was Chinese water torture or something. Thank God the vet is only 2 minutes from the house.

3. My new job is GREAT!

4. The bad part about hurrying to finish up a quilt for a show is that it always gives me a bad case of what-to-do-next-itis. I've been suffering for two weeks since finishing Kiwi Laguna...fussing around, pulling stuff out and thinking about it but not committing to actually working on anything. Finally, this weekend, thanks to my lovely and talented friend Pam Mostek, I started something new. Oops. Oh well, it's small and it's for a good cause. Pam sent me an email about her quilt that was in the latest auction for Ami Simms' Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative and it reminded me that I need to do something about that. So here goes:



and also:



These are just starts, playing around without "getting too precious" as Jeannette Meyer would say (and did, several times in class last week). I'm having fun with the bold graphic look of these.



5. I spent quite a bit of last Thursday evening dreaming up a quilt based on this line from the song Soul Kitchen by The Doors: your fingers leap with minarets, speak in secret alphabets... And then on Friday morning I went to Starbucks and pulled a word of the day off the little notepads they have now and this is what I got: prestidigitation: skill in performing magic or conjuring tricks with the hands. I love it when things like that happen.

Some interesting things going on here...

These are the results of the final exercise from the Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer workshop I took yesterday. It was a design workshop, working with line, so these are just exercises, getting us to think about how we use line in our quilts. So many interesting ways of using line, yes? The workshop was excellent and Jeannette was delightful, offering a lot of insight and critique and provocative questions. She gave me a lot to think about and I know it will take a couple of days to process it.

Saturday's quilt show was wonderful, there was such a wide range of interesting contemporary work and lots of debate going on over the merits of different pieces. Jeannette Meyer was the quilt show judge and she was available all day to discuss the work. I loved having the opportunity to discuss my pieces with a professional. Again more things to think about and process.

Lots of other interesting things going on around here right now too. I start a new job today and Dave gets to start working with a new president at EWU. I'm still at the Court of Appeals, but today I leave the clerk's office and start working for one of the judges. I think this job will be a great fit for me and I'm really excited about it. Also, Dave was appointed to the Cheney Planning Commission and will start that next week. The one thing he really misses from his days as editor of the town newspaper is being involved in city business, so I think he's looking forward to having an active role again.

And just in case that wasn't enough excitement for one week, AshLee has her official campus visit with the EWU track program today and tomorrow!