Quilts, Transfer Letters, and Serendipity, Oh My!

I dropped my quilt for Barakah Life's Sew Giving Bee, (the deadline has been extended, by the way) in the mail today and I got John to snap a bad cell phone picture of it before I sealed up the box. This is the second quilt I've made and it turned out so adorably! The robots are on a really nice, soft flannel and the yellow squares are from a soft, old sheet that is yellow and white stripey-ish.

While I was out I stopped by the craft store to get some black screen printing ink and I found a whole set of opaque, opalescent inks for fabric. Heaven! A bit pricey, but not unreasonable, so I got them. And glory of glories, right next to the screen printing supplies there were rub on transfer letters! I have been looking for these for quite some time now, I fell in love with them as a child and I simply adore them for embellishing crafts and mail! I was looking in the fabric/sewing/embroidery clearance section and I came across a cute design for embroidery. It was a map design and I've been obsessed with maps lately (probably all of the traveling I've done in the last 6 months or so), so I think I'm going to make my own map design to embroider. I'd rather use a real map that has some meaning to me, or maybe make a map of some of my favorite places and use that as an embroidery template. I'll keep you posted.

While I was there I also broke down and bought some quilt binding for the quilt I'm making for my sibling's child because it matched and now that means I have everything I need to complete the quilt! I'd really like to finish it before I pack up all my belongings (again) and ship my stuff to Oakland, so I can send it off from here before I leave instead of dragging it back to the west coast in pieces and finishing it there.

On my way back home I was having one of those moments of connection and extreme clarity with my intuition and guidance. I was thinking to myself "Am I going the wrong way?" about the road I was driving on, and I looked to the street sign to get my bearings. As I looked back up I had to stop short in order to avoid colliding with the car in front of me and their license plate said "POTTERY". I'm not kidding you!
After the way I was feeling when I got my massage on Saturday, it seems clear that it's important for me to get back into ceramics, because that's a pretty straightforward message, as far as I'm concerned.

Mini Art Quilt

Today I am working on a mini art quilt. I was piecing some fabric together to make a doll, but I decided that the combo wasn't what I wanted for that project, so there I had rectangle of a very interesting mix of polka dot fabrics. What to do with it? A mini art quilt, that's what! So now there is a flannel robot, a fancy lady and a polka dotted bird, along with two trees. I glued everything on and I'm waiting for the glue to dry before I throw in some decorative and functional stitches. I'm interested to see how it turns out, I've never made anything quite like this before. Sorry about the horrible picture quality, I'll try to get better pictures up when I'm finished.









I have been considering coming up with a years worth of weekly projects and posting them here, either as a tutorial or as contest/craft-a-long sort of thing. I think either way it would be a good way to motivate myself to make a new project each week, which will certainly help to keep my aires heart happy.

Next week I'm going to Florida for one last visit to friends and family before heading back to the west coast at the end of next month. I'm going to to have to start packing up my things after my Florida jaunt, and I must say I don't feel entirely ready to leave my sanctuary in the woods and return to the world of city living and working. I am, however, looking forward to seeing the folks I miss, The Princess, and having more resources available to me again (transit! free weekly yoga! vegan pizza delivery!). Ending this convalescence will certainly be bittersweet to say the least, but at least I still have about a month left.

Snow and paper dolls

It's snowing outside right now, just little flurries, nothing's sticking so far, but it's the second time it's snowed since I've been in GA. Today was an errand running day for me; I took a package of crafty fun to the post office, went to an office supply store and stopped by the bank and a fabric store.

I am in the process of making little dancing paper dolls and I needed some brads (paper fasteners) for the joints on them. When I'm done posting this I'm going to get back to work on them, so far they are so, so cute!

At the fabric store I finally bought the batting and the backing for the quilt I'm making for my sibling's child, and it was half off for all of the fleeces so I decided to go with a fleece backing for it. I made the quilt out of a bunch of different fabrics, but two of them are reproductions of old tattoo flash from reprodepot.com and it's turning out adorably, I have finished all of the piecework and now that I have the batting and the backing I just need to finish the bias tape so I can get it all together.
When I was making my last quilt (for the sew giving blanket drive), I found an amazing tutorial for continual bias tape here, which is really helpful. I'm horrible at math but I was still able to to use the tutorial really effectively, so even if you are also math challenged, don't be scared of this tutorial, it's do-able.
I wandered around the fabric store for a while because it was the last day of a sale (happy to have stumbled upon that!) and I found the most adorable fabric. It's a retro/repro sort of print with little fabulous femme people (many of whom are wearing bloomers and we all know how I simply adore bloomers!) on it all making baked goods on/in old, cast iron, wood stoves. It's simply amazing and it came in my two favorite colors- pink and red. The one with the pink background even had the stoves a darker shade of pink, it's just so cute. I don't know specifically what I want to make out of it, but I simply had to buy it, really. I think it will probably end up being in the quilt that I'm going to make for myself (at some point). I've got a very old quilt that was a hand-me-down from my mom, I think my great grandmother made it, anyway, I love it and unfortunately it's falling apart beyond the point of repair, but I think I will just use the whole quilt as batting for another quilt, and this one I'm making just for myself! Has anyone tried that before? Did it work?

Well, I'm going to get back to crafting in my nice warm room while the snow falls outside. Stay warm!

*addendum*

I had to post some pictures because the dancing deer turned out so adorably; you pull on the string hanging down and the legs go out, making it look like its leaping! The first one is pink, sparkly, and fabulous






It's hard to see in these low quality pictures, but the second one is cut out of a map (with cardboard sandwiched in between.




And the third one is made from an old veterinary xray, which doesn't really show in the picture, but looks amazing in a window.




These turned out so cute, I think I will use them for my "thanks for your hospitality" gifts during my Florida visit.