Too much fun...

Just for the record, I am diligently working on the red/green quilt that I have to hurry up and get done. I do a bit of that and then I goof off a bit with some of this:


I slapped some paint on some white fabric last night and then tonight I puttered around with stamps. I love doing surface design stuff like this. Next I'll add some embroidery.

Cool as this is, I was still only having a reasonable, rational amount of fun with it until I downloaded the picture to post to the blog. I hit the tint button in Picasa and that's when I came up with this:



And this:



Could I get some yardage of this please?



And of course I need that in green:



Wow, it may be time to break out the fabric printer sheets...

Little projects

I made this pillow for the couch last night. I should be working on my green and red quilt, but my brain has been hijacked by pretty, crafty blogs lately and I've been wanting to make something crafty. So my theory was that I could whip up something in an evening and get it out of my system. We'll see how that works out.

I like this, but it didn't really turn out the way I wanted it to. I was interested in more of a scrappy vintage-y look. But the fabrics I pulled just weren't working so I ended up paring it down to just these two.

Snapshots from the weekend

I had a superbusy weekend, starting Friday when I took a day off to help Ash get ready for college. We opened a bank account for her (an absurdly difficult and time-consuming task these days) and then met Dave's parents and shopped 'til we dropped for dorm room accessories. We made a quick stop at Ben Franklin for thank you cards and I found these excellent stamps and this cute little box of buttons.


Saturday we had a track meet, a retirement party and dozens of errands, fortunately all in Cheney. I was literally stopped in my tracks on the way to the track meet by this little bird...he didn't move when I walked past him. He didn't move when I took his picture or even when I very gently prodded him with a stick. He wasn't visibly injured, he was alert, he wasn't even remotely scared of me or anyone else. He stayed in my driveway for NINE HOURS! I left the house and came back at least 5 times during the day and he was always there. I thought he must be sick and so I fretted about him all day. Fretting is one of my better skills. Finally at 9:00, a big robin landed across the street. My little bird perked up, sang a little song and flew! OK, he only got about waist high, only went about 20 feet and sorta landed on his belly, but he flew! And then he flew several more times and then the mom fed him some worms. And then we discovered his brother in the back yard! And then the mom took them both home and I was able to breathe a big sigh of relief.


Sunday we concluded AshLee Appreciation Month with a small get-together at our house. I restrained myself and only made this modest shrine. Later we put candles on the leftover cake and celebrated Father's Day and 3 June birthdays.


Here's the lovely young lady herself, sporting a Baby Gap hat she borrowed from 20-month-old guest Gavin.


OK, this photo isn't from the weekend, it's from Tuesday. But it features two of my favorite things! Now that track and graduation are over I have a few extra minutes to spend in the garden, playing with the cat, and/or sewing. Theoretically.

color week: red

Sheesh, even when I take a picture in the house it ends up with flowers in it! This is from the kitchen, the roses are my wedding bouquet - I had it made with velvet roses. I was goofing off with the saturation feature this morning and liked the results so today's picture is a bit "altered"


Taking these color pictures was a fun exercise and one I definitely recommend. Most days I had an idea of what I wanted to photograph, but I never ended up posting pics of my original idea. The best shots ended up being the ones I randomly snapped as I roamed the house and garden looking for the designated color.

color week: blue

I'm honestly trying to take color photos in the house...it's just that the best shots keep happening in the garden.

color week: black/gray

There's plenty of black and gray around here lately as we've had pouring down rain and thunderstorms nearly every day. We've already had record rain levels for June and it's only the 14th.

I just love these little garden knomes. They look like they just love to hang out together and have too much fun. They live outside our front door year-round.



P.S. Happy Birthday Dad!!

color week: brown

Well, not a lot of brown around here either, mostly furniture. I tried some pictures of guitars and cute little brown amplifiers, but they turned out bleh. So I return you once again to the garden for a shot of this excellent little coal bucket:

color week: white

Stephanie at little birds is doing a color week this week. The daily colors are mostly neutrals which will be an interesting challenge for me since I tend to be all about the brights.

Monday is white. The only white things in my house are appliances and walls. Yes, it's true, I'm in love with color and I have white walls. And I like them. We have high ceilings and I love the cool breezy feel of the white walls.

Since no one wants to look at walls, you're getting a garden photo. Try not to be too shocked.

Yummy

See, I told you there was quilting content happening. This bit is an experiment, trying to figure out how the heck to sew these circle thingies. Believe it or not, I actually came up with this idea before I noticed the whole red and yellow thing going on with the begonias yesterday (see post below). The begonias just confirmed that I should go ahead with this plan. It actually started with the red and green. I noticed them tangled up together in a big mess of fabric I pulled out of the dryer last week and thought "wow! gotta do something with that!" Then I pulled out Quilter's Playtime by Dianne S. Hire to look at something else and noticed the lovely circle thingies on the cover and thought "oh, red and green."

Here's what I learned from making this prototype:

1. These suckers are big (ok, when the biggest thing you've made in forever is 20" x 22", it doesn't take much to be "big". I was trying to make a "small" one and it turned out over 9" across. But big is good because I'm supposed to make something that's at least 30" x 30").

2. It doesn't matter how smarty-pants you think you're being with measuring the angles, it still takes 30ish wedges to make a circle (26 in this small one). I guess that's why I'm a history major.

3. When you start sewing the wedges together, they really start to curve a lot more. Whew!

check out the texture and pattern

I noticed this while watering the begonias this morning. It's one of those begonias that ends up with tons of fluffy ruched petals on each blossom. This one is just getting started - it's got one set of petals and those excellent yellow spirals in the middle are the rest of the petals just beginning to bust out.

There is quilt content going on here, but it's not quite ready for prime time.

Way To Go Pretty Girl!

AshLee graduated from Lewiston High School yesterday. Her mom invited everyone to a barbecue after - it was a really wonderful scene, spilling over with oodles of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. AshLee was just glowing. Here she is at our house in the morning...I think this was somewhere in the middle of the 3 hours of hair curling...

It's all about the little things

Like these tiny kildeer babies that hatched yesterday in the empty lot next to my office. Folks have been watching the nest for several days and yesterday it disappeared, replaced with these tiny little wonders running around on their little stick legs. Turns out kildeer are precocial which means they can run around and feed themselves within an hour or so of hatching. Completely amazing.

Well drat, stupid blogger didn't upload the zoomed in picture and I don't have time to mess around with it. If you click on the picture it'll bring up a bigger version and you can actually see the little fluffies.