Long time no see

Whew! Lots to catch up on. My youngest daughter got back from the Nicaragua mission trip last night. Can't wait to get the details from her today about the trip. Maybe she brought me something. My son should be back in Hattiesburg some time today from his Spring Break trip to Destin (at least I think it was Destin....someplace warm and sandy in FL at any rate) and my oldest daughter has been home all week. The St. Paddy's parade was yesterday and there were 50,000 people here for it. The krewe I belong to won $600 for the Show me the Money award and a picture of my brother made the front page of the on-line newspaper. The oldest had an absolute blast walking in the parade too. Her first year to actually participate.

My Ebony and Ivory Blues quilt (the one with the hands drawn by my friend) won a ribbon at the GSQA quilt show in Baton Rouge too, so that was a nice little piece of news this week. I also woke up with a full-blown idea in my head for a new fiber piece that will need some definite tweaking and playing with the mechanics of it, and it isn't even a quilted piece! Well, it might be if that's the only way I can stabilize it, but for right now, I'm leaning away from quilting it. I've made some progress on the Japanese shadow box quilt but my machine is acting horsey about free-motion so the progress is mostly hand work. What in the hell possessed me to think I needed to do needle turn applique on the thing? I'm liking the effect a lot but it's definitely not my cup of tea for any length of time. Fortunately, I picked something that only has leaves that have to be needle-turned and the rest of it is just handwork that's attached afterwards. I'm doing the bush clover from Fabled Fibers and so far, I'm happy with the effect. It's been YEARS since I've done any embroidery, too. Spent several days looking at various Sashiko patterns and nothing really jumps out at me so I may wind up just making my own with Sashiko stitching and leave it at that. I picked up Larkin Van Horn's book this week too and have some ideas in my head for beading that I'd like to work on. I need to get together some small samples of my embellishment stuff anyway to apply as a circuit teacher for the GSQA. I have most of the written material to submit I think, maybe with some minor refinements, but nothing really small enough to ship off for the jurying process involved. I may break down and do some postcards with the different techniques on them, and submit classes for both postcards AND embellishments. I reallyreallyreally love teaching and this is probably my best bet for getting into an organized method of doing it. As it stands now, I just go when someone hunts me down and calls me. No promotion or advertising myself, just doing the simple programs at the guilds and getting calls periodically from people who see me speak.