As always, our December Frayed Edges was friends, food, smiles and fun.

And since it was December, gifties!  We met in Kate’s couple-hundred-year-old farmhouse near Merrymeeting Bay (isn’t that the most awesome name?) on a gray day with the woodstove warming us in the kitchen/dining room, and Bailey (OOOPS…I am SO bad with names)  Bristol the wonderdog keeping us company. The photo at the very  top is as I sat in my chair and looked up…isn’t the shadow pattern on the ceiling awesome?

As always, Kathy was the one with work to share!

Kathy's portrait of her son, for a drum case!

Her son is a drummer, and asked Mom to make him some round covers to put on his drum cases.  Kathy is using a different technique for each, and this one is a portrait  of said son done with bleach pen on cloth!  Totally cool!  She shared that she did a sketch of her son, place glass or clear plastic on top, drew over the lines with the bleach pen, THEN placed the cloth down  on the bleach pen.  That solved the problem of having the bleach react too much with where you start drawing and not enough where you finish.  A clever lady she is!

Then we had gifties… My small offerings are the mistletoe, Kath gave us each awonderful key and card holder, thereby supporting local craftswomen, and Kate took some fabric I had given her (an old damask tablecloth of Mom’s, actually), dyed it, and made us a set of re-usable gift bags.  Those clearly will be for in-house giving!!!!  Kate made the lovely vignette of votives on a small mirror (also found at the local dump’s swap shack….I really need to go to the Bowdoinham dump!), then gave us the candles which you saw here on my blog! Kate recycled old music sheets to make them.

then there is lunch in the sunshine:

including soup and dessert…yum!

Then we remembered Deborah, our itinerant member who lived in Maine, then near Dallas, and now near Annapolis, had sent a box!  more gifties! Here are her funny snowmen and one of the inspiring ‘zines she makes:

After lunch, Kate said “let’s make journals”.  Hunh? It appears the gift-giving wasn’t over!  Kate bought this cool gizzie and said we’d make journals.  Apparently the covers of discarded Readers’ Digest Condensed Books make the best recycled covers.  And then Kate had a stash of de-commissioned letterhead from a couple places; some of the paper had this “ghost” terrain map on it…SO cool!   So she let us choose from her stash of scavenged-from-the-swap-shack (gotta go there!) stuff, and we made our own journals.  I’ll share than in a post fairly soon.

Finally, there is Bailey Bristol being sweet!

Last year (I had to search my blog to find it), my word for the year was

Simplify.

Even though I had actually attempted to do that over the course of the year, the fact that I didn’t remember the word (sigh) will tell you that I have some work to do on that score!

The word for 2011 is

Breathe.

The year, as I mentioned yesterday, is starting on quite a stressful note thanks (well, NO thanks) to the owner of the house on which we put an offer.  Our house has sold, so we MUST move  (we have a short rentback from the new owners and think we can extend that a bit), but we don’t know if the current owner will comply with the requirement to be out of the house for *us* to occupy it when we go to closing due to a lot of things that have gone on since we got the contract to sell our house.  So we will know next week when closing happens if he will be out, and if it will be this month……

In the meantime, I am trying to breathe.  Trying not to feel like a quivering mass of stress.  Trying to pack up some things, clear out junk (to Goodwill when suitable, to the dump when not!), keep up with paperwork, not snap at the hubster and children.  All will be well in the long run, but at the moment it is pretty nerve-wracking.  Again, I’ll ask for you all to send vibes for things to work out the way we would most like!

Happy New Year to one and all!

Hi all…just ducking in to wish you all a blessed and peaceful new year filled with joy and creativity!

Made using Susan Brubaker Knapp's pattern in Quilting Arts Gifts 2010-2011 issue

This past week we became tenants…yes, we sold our house!  It was on the market for an unbelievable twelve days before we had an offer!  That good news has led to a bunch of difficulty, however, with the owner of the house on which we had already made an offer (the only reason we listed our house was to purchase the one we had just seen).  Let’s just say things are turbulent, so please send good wishes for the desired outcome!  We are renting back for the rest of this month, but at the moment we don’t know where we’ll be living in six weeks!!!! EEEK!Let’s just say things are tense…..

That, of course, has seriously stymied creativity.  That and the fact that I should be packing and cleaning out in preparation for our move!

The photo above, by the way, I’ll blog about more…. I had a pattern included in the Quilting Arts Gifts issue for this year (2010-2011), my fabric frames.  My favorite other pattern in the issue is my friend Susan Brubaker Knapp‘s beautiful mistletoe.  Since I didn’t have the embroidery floss or wool balls I had to improvise, but I love the way these turned out.  I made them as gifts for my Frayed Edges friends, so will blog about our Frayed Edges meeting soon and also the making of the mistletoe.

Now it’s time for dinner, so I’ll sign off and wish you all a Happy new year!

Yes, while the turkey was roasting on Christmas day and the potatoes were boiling and the pie and stuffing were done, I took a little time for art!  About a thousand lifetimes ago (meaning last winter, maybe February-ish) I took an online class with Sharon Boggon (her site is here and is now called In a Minute Ago, here blog is  Pin Tangle)  about a “working” sketchbook.  Not a fancy, work-of-art-in-itself journal, but about using a journal as a way to flesh out ideas and stimulate creativity.  Here’s a link to the class description…I really enjoyed the class!  Alas, I have been abysmal at keeping up with it–simply too much life happening.  BUT…. I have the journal and the supplies and the desire.  So on Christmas I made the time!

I just LOVE how this turned out....it makes me happy. Being creative and noodling around just makes me content. I should do this more!

I took some of the squares I had cut from magazine pages, and some words and phrases, and started gluing them up.  One page became two…. then I took my WONDERFUL Christmas gift from hubby:  a set of 72 Derwent Inktense pencils

The Inktense pencils are in the upper left. My magazine snippings are in the box, and the bag on the right is my travel-art bag, with room for a set of 6 graphite pencils, a 12-travel-set of watercolor, a waterbrush, glue stick and a couple odd pens are inside in their custom-made pockets

and a waterbrush and, in the evening after supper while watching Starman with my family, colored in the background.  I LOVE IT!

And I cannot let the last Christmas posting pass without Kate’s candles–I’ll blog about our Frayed Edges meeting in a few days, but I had to share these.  Kate found the votives in cylindrical glass cups then re-purposed old (tossed out) sheet music.  The large one is from Stonewall Kitchen (a Maine company) and smells of “Maine Forest.”

My new Canon G12 has a "candlelight" setting on the dial, and this was taken just holding the camera still, no tripod or bracing...love it!

The pug always gets top billing...and he loved his raccoon! See how proud he is!

The before:

Twas the night before Christmas, and the goodies were actually wrapped!

The stocking were hung by the chimney with care (using my new best thingies, easily removed “command strip” hooks):

I promise...the stockings really are there, just off to the left....

The during:

That's Paul's hand in the lower right--he tends to glare at the camera so I mostly take pictures of the boys, when they tolerate it....

We had a lovely Christmas and hope you did, too!  I recently killed my beloved Panasonic DMC FZ-30 camera.  The first death blow was when hiking about 3 years ago and I slipped and the camera banged against a rock hard enough to chip the metal on the rim…miraculously, the camera still took good photos…good enough that all the studio / in progress shots in my book are taken on that one “after the fall” (and no, I didn’t get but a scrape…I was a lot more upset about the camera)!…the final death blow was a couple weeks ago when it slipped off a pile of fabric on my work table.  I had moved it, foolishly, to the top of a not-terribly-stable or flat pile to make room to cut something.  Then I bumped the table.  Ooops.  Landed lens down, and that led to a repair that led to the front of the lens coming off.  Erg.  So I bought a Canon G12 as a carry-around camera (not one of the fits in a jeans or shirt pocket size, but fits in a jacket pocket or purse easily) and have discovered it takes AWESOME pictures.  These were almost ALL taken *without* flash and handheld…. I could never have done that on the old camera!

The not-roast beast:

Thumper had to check out Paul's gift of salami, which beloved SIL Joyce sends from California since we can't get this here on the East Coast

We will only touch briefly on the fact that Paul left the salami on the table and the next day the pug, temporarily persona non grata, helped himself to one of them.  Including a lot of the paper wrapper.  Astonishingly, the pug was not sick. Paul was a bit queasy about the loss of the one salami, but he didn’t ask the dog to return it.  Ahem.

Are you done taking pictures yet?

After snapping about a dozen pictures of the boys and Paul, I hit their limit….. but I DO like the camera!