These two are small art quilts. The lake piece was sold a couple of months ago, and the Chicago jazz piece is in a private collection. The lake is hand-painted raw silk and silk charmeuse, drapery and upholstery trims and fringes, real sand and seashells, lace, buttons and beading. The jazz piece is hand-painted organza over commercial prints with crystal beading on the skyscrapers.

off to Minnesota

Two of my quilts are anyway. The big yellow one is "Jump, Jive and Wail" and the Miles Davis is "Don't Play What's There"

They' re going to a Katrina show at the Hennepin County building in Minneapolis for a month. The exhibit was arranged by the group Minnesota Helpers for Mississippi artists. I'm thrilled to death to have the 2 pieces in the show too!

Storage of the useful kind

I found this great retail store fixture at the Good Samaritan re-sale shop the other day for $65. It has 8 shallow drawers and 2 deep ones, a center cabinet with 8...count 'em, EIGHT!...3-prong plugs inside the cabinet. It also has 2 pull out trays at different heights. The best thing about the piece is that it is totally covered in formica, including white formica drawer linings, and the drawers are all on industrial drawer slides. Of course, to make room for it in the work room I had to go on a cleaning binge. We hauled a pick-up truck bed (about a foot higher than the bed of the truck) down to Good Sam to donate, and hauled this monster back. I FINALLY can make use of all the light from the windows without having them half blocked. It was hard at first to decide what fabric stayed and what went, but the longer I was at it, the easier it became. Then I responded to a post on the free-cycle from a woman looking for fabric and she came over and hauled a bunch of it off too. Then Rissa http://prettyimpressivestuff.com/blog/ came and took a ton of old lace and trim and ribbon and scraps of the nice fabric. Slowly but surely I'm getting some of this stuff out of here. I still have to pack and mail a bunch of smaller pkgs to people on the Habiliments list, but that will come. I even managed to sort and repack my own fabric in big plastic bins that sit nicely on the shelving unit, and small plastic baskets that store nicely on the bookshelves. I managed to keep my 8x3 work surface/cutting table too. The room is fairly small so some things are in 2 layers, but easily moved. At least everything has a specific place now, and that place is NOT the floor!