WOOOO HOOOO!

My DH walked in last night with a bag of Krystals and 2 special treats for me, as if the Krystals weren't enough. He had 1 gig of memory for my computer, and a check for tuition to Sonji Hunt's http://sonjisays.blogspot.com/ week-long class at the Tougaloo Art Colony this July!! You wouldn't believe how excited I am about this. My oldest daughter has attended for 3 years but this is the first time I've had a chance to go myself. I've followed, and admired, Sonji's work for several years now and the opportunity to actually take a whole class from her is unbelievable. I have until the middle of July to get my machine tuned up and start gathering fabrics and supplies. There are a lot of quilt artists out there doing fabric painting and surface design, but none quite like Sonji. I love the additional texture she incorporates with the grommets and heavy stitching and her famous bundles. Visual texture and depth is good, but I really look forward to the physical texture lessons. It goes so far beyond my weak attempts with the Mardi Gras beads and embellishments and beading and just plain 'stuff' I tend to use. She also has that fantastic graphic color sense that I strive so hard for. Maybe a week with her will improve my ratio of "getting it right" on my own work.

And my computer is FLYING now with the added memory. Maybe I can actually get patterns to print out in less than 94 hours now.

Gettin' it in gear

"Quarter Note" is going to the art show with me Friday if I get it finished in time. I feel like I will once I can decide on a quilting pattern for it. It's anchored now in the ditch on the vertical seams but I need to do something else with it too. Not sure what, but at least I have this much of it done. That's progress at any rate.

"Good Wishes" is also going. I have no doubt it will be finished since there's very little left to do on it. The print at the top is the backing and I intentionally left it showing in the pic because the pins at the bottom right sort of show the placement of one of the groups of flowers on the back. My intention is to do some bobbin work with the gold thread to outline the cluster of flowers so they show on the front. The backing fabric won't actually be visible from the front unless I decide to use it for the binding though.

The round piece is a felt tree skirt I got at Dollar Tree back around Christmas and then forgot about. I added some foiling, painting, stenciling and thread work to the original felt in several different golds and stamped the small black symbols. I'll have to get better pictures of the details in a close-up shot and get them posted once I'm through with it. The gold mesh is quilted in flowing, wavy vertical lines with the gold thread. Not sure yet what sort of quilting I'll do inside the circle or on the black, but I'm sure I'll have some flash of inspiration soon enough.

Happy Easter!

This is my contribution to Easter food this year. Eggs dyed with silk ties. There were some really cool silk boxers I could have used, but it would have felt too much like that commercial about colon polyps where the guy eats the lima bean.

I've been thinking through the assembly on a new design and that's taken up all my time and energy for the last couple of days. I finally decided on the construction, although I'm SURE there's an easier way to do it. Or maybe not. It's a pieced background with a big applique over it, except that there are 'blank' spots in the applique that are only stitched lines across some of the background pieces. Hard to describe and even harder to figure out technically. I finally wound up basting the background pieces together, stitching the outline for the applique on the whole thing, then taking it apart so I can do the applique on the pieces that have it and the outline stitches on the pieces that have that. Then I'll sew all the background pieces back together. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the background pieces off-set at the seams so the outlines and applique don't line up. I just finished a very simple 4-patch for a friend so I think my Muse is punishing me.