And this week, that is definitely the priority order!   Last Saturday was Maine’s Eastern Regional Class B Wrestling Tournament, and this morning (I leave in an hour) is States!  Eli placed second last week, to a kid he beat at Eastern Regionals in 7th Grade (three years ago).  So today he is headed out to States with determination!  Eli was leading 7-3 until the last minute of the third period (three two-minute periods).  The other kid spotted an opening, took it, and won.  Bummers!   Eli handled it well, and we will see what happens today…I am VERY nervous, so send Eli “wrestle your best” thoughts please! He has worked SO HARD, that I would love  him to be able to meet his own and the coaches’ expectations!

Eli in the Finals at Maine’s 2014 Eastern Regional Wrestling Tournament

I’ve begun working on an entry for a juried invitational (where they set a theme, invite some folks to submit entries, and you hope you get in), but if I share, then I can’t enter.  So I can’t share.  And I have another good thing that happened, but can’t share that either!  AAAARGH!   So I’m really busy, happy, but must fight all natural impulses to share.

We had a couple recent snowstorms, were supposed to get one on Tuesday, then another one cropped up for tonight–predicting 10-16 inches!  On the one that ended yesterday it was supposed to be snow, sleet, snow, but it never turned back to snow.  So we ended up with about 6-8 inches of REALLY WET snow.  Luckily, Eli wanted to shovel it as training on the snow day from school (He told use we have used up the last of the school snow days, so if they have to have another, the school year will be extended!).

So that’s the news from Hope….stay tuned for today’s results.  One this is certain:  We will be and are proud of Eli!  Now, I need to eat breakfast, walk the dog, and then get on the road to Bath!

Woooohoooo!   I got IN!  Yep, I am thrilled that I will soon be spending a small fortune to send a 40 x 100 cm quilt to Australia to be in the Living Colour Textiles exhibit! The bad news is that I can’t share a full picture until the exhibit opens at the Australasian Quilt Show in Melbourne in mid-April!  But I can share some of the “early” pics…..

Fabric stretched out on some rigid foam core, manually pleated/folded, dye applied, ready to be covered and batched!

The exhibit is called Living Colour, and as the curator Brenda Gael Smith reminded folks, there are two parts to that title!   I have been noodling around with an idea for a week-long workshop around the theme Quilting the Good Life (c), and Quilting the Garden as a part of that.  The workshop would involve learning my collage and thread-coloring techniques with a small project (similar for all), then moving on to develop a quilt based on one’s own photography or imagery, then quilting it.  (If anyone wants to hire me to do this, please write!)  This quilt will fit in that rubric!  Although I usually use lots of batiks, this quilt was mostly my own hand-dyes with a few batiks.  And of course I left it to the last minute to make the quilt!  About 10 days before it was due, I dug out the dye pots (above) to make the red fabric in exactly the color and texture I needed, which I did by manually “pleating” the wet fabric and applying dye with a sponge paintbrush.

The resulting red fabrics used on the front (and back) of the quilt.

As long as I had dyes mixed up,

Last year’s $$ investment in the business was to put a sink into the basement. It is in the room with the water pump, oil tank, water heater, etc., but I have just (barely) enough room to put the 4×8 rigid foam core on top of a folding table and have this re-purposed kitchen cart on the side for mixing. Those of you who have take Carol Soderlund’s fabulous classes will recognize some of my color pages clipped above the mixing station. And I have learned to keep notes in my spiral notebook of what primaries I’ve used so I can replicate–like the green in a photo below.

I overdyed some hideously ugly fabric I had made, some in a workshop, some on my own.  The beauty of cotton hand-dyes is that if they turn out vile, you can just keep throwing on dye.  Either they turn good, or you add more dye and get some great deep browns and mottled forest colors!  These are clearly the before shots:

The plum fabrics on the left were from a workshop exercise. I cut a small bit off each to remind myself, then over dyed. The teacher won’t tell you the purpose of the exercise, she wants you to learn by doing. That’s fine, but if I had known the exercise was to force splitting of the dyes I would NEVER have selected the final plum color because the blue-yellow make that nasty mint green! Thankfully I did not follow her suggestion to use a yard each, but instead only wasted a fat quarter each. Which are still hideous enough!

This ugliness was a mopping up cloth. UGLY.

These are the after:

The green on the top is a hand-dye I like and want to reproduce. The blue on the bottom is a purchased batik. The pink-coral with blue splotches is the fugly piece just above. The orange-fuchsia-yellow are that plum-mint ugliness. The fuglies are going back for more color. Ugh. They will make good browns eventually!

Result:  less awful than before, but back in the over-dye (again) pile!

SNEAK PEEK:  and finally, here you can see a pile of red off-cuts from my quilt for Living Colour Textiles.  I fused the reds with Mistyfuse, cut my shapes, and had leftover bits.  Those will go into the next project, a quilt of Eli during cross-country season in his red team uniform of tank and shorts.   That one is already in the sketched out, fabrics selected, fusing happening stage!  I WILL make more than two quilts this year!

Off-cuts from my Living Colour piece, all Mistyfused. They were SO fiddly to cut I figure I will use these somehow…

And I had to add Tyger, who decided to help warm some of the fabric by sitting on top (thankfully the plastic extended well beyond the edges of the pan) of the fabrics batching by the woodstove!

What a silly cat! Tyger has his back half sitting on the fabric, his front half going paw-paw on the plastic on the floor.

About a month or so ago, Eli came in from the yard and said “Mom, what bird would be all white with brown spots?”  The only bird I could think of was a snowy owl, but we are way too far South of their normal range, so I dug out my Peterson guide and went through the entire thing.  The only all-white bird with brown spots was the owl.  Asked Eli: what shape head and beak?  “I don’t know, it was flying away from me.”  Then a few days later on NPR there was a report of many Snowy Owl sightings in Maine this winter…. and we had one in our yard, and I had missed it.

Snowy Owl at Clarry Hill, Union, Maine

Then my friend Kathy told me she had SEEN the snowy owls at Clarry Ridge in Union, about 12 miles from our house, and told me how to get up to the ridge, which by the way is freakin’ unbelievably gorgeous blueberry barrens with a 360 view that goes for miles and miles and miles.  So after a wonderful lunch with Gail and Louisa at Boynton McKay in town, I decided to explore and hope for the best.

The blueberry barrens are this incredible russet color in autumn and winter. There is SO a blueberry barrens quilt in my future. And maybe dyeing fabric. Soon.  We are lucky to look out from our house (about 8 miles as the crow flies from here) and see barrens on the hill opposite.

Clarry Hill is apparently part of the Medomak Nature Preserve , and it is in the middle of a hilltop of blueberry barrens.  I wasn’t a hundred yards up the path that I was taking pictures of the late afternoon light picking up the incredible colors of the barrens:

How GLORIOUS is this color? Looking to the west-northwest to Appleton and Union.  I want to dye fabric these colors…..

It was so glorious I didn’t mind that I didn’t see an owl.  Then on my way back to the car I saw a woman with binoculars scanning and she had a camera hanging around her neck, too, so I asked her if she was there for the owl.  And she pointed one out to me…at that point s/he (the owl) was behind me to the left:

See that white spot in the tree? That’s my first view of the snowy owl! Gotta go log that into the margins of my Roger Tory Petersen guide!

I took several photos, had a lovely chat with Hilda L. from South Hope, then headed back to the car after taking MORE photos of the blueberry barrens.  Talk about wanting to head straight to the dye-pots!   Anyway, I get in the car and start backing out when out of the corner of my eye I see movement:  a snowy owl (Hilda told me there are at least two and possibly three up there) landed in the tree just up from the parking spot!  So I took a bunch of photos, then moved down the drive a bit and took MORE photos.  And was lucky to snap the owl stretching his/her wings a couple of times!

From the small parking area (on bare rock at the end of a short dirt road), I caught sight of the owl. I had to use digital as well as optical zoom so these aren’t terribly high res photos, but WHO CARES?

I sat there long enough that the owl started moving its wings–just getting comfortable I guess as it didn’t take off. I LOVE having digital instead of film because I can take a bazillion photos and luck into a couple like these!

How AWESOME are those wings?

I inched down the dirt road a bit to see if I could get an angle for a shot that didn’t have twigs between me and the bird.  Here’s the view from the care before zooming:

From the road looking up the hill with the lens at wide angle setting. Isn’t Maine beautiful?

More flapping…I LOVE seeing the wings!

And just a bit more flapping…look at his floofy legs!

And I’ll confess to a little photoshop to lighten the shadows on this one. The owl was backlit by the setting sun, so I lightened the shadows.

This has been a glorious day:  order for a pattern this morning, some artwork and art lessons, lunch with friends, Joshua calls me and wants to see me because he got a haircut (photo on Facebook timeline), I see Ashley (his girlfriend) because she works where we went to lunch and when I went to pay she hands my card back to me and says no, I took care of it (THANK YOU  you sweet thing, you totally do not need to do that!), ran a couple errands, saw the owl, got great photos, then get home to a pair of sandals I ordered from Zappos (they are green, how could I resist) AND a new duvet cover—we’ve had one new duvet cover in about the past 15 years, so I figure we’re due, and it was on sale, and I love it and it totally cheers up the bedroom.  So I am HAPPY!   Here’s to you being happy, too!  Life is GOOD!

Time for another catch-up post, about my Decorative Stitch Applique class on Friday at Quilt Festival.   I’m on a yahoo group for Janome 6600-7700-8900 owners, and a discussion cropped up about using the decorative stitches and I realized I had yet to post this information, so here goes!

The Funky Chicken, from Sarah’s Decorative Stitch Applique class in Houston.  Right click to enlarge image.  I’ve stacked (grouped) stitches on this one.  For example, the checkerboard (in yellow upper left) is two passes of a satin stitch that has two columns of small alternating squares.  To the lower right of the green square, a scroll stitch is bracketed with scallops.  The center square is appliqued, stitched with the “V” stapes, then outlined with a bold straight stitch.  Done on a Janome 8900.

Ya know how we all have these fancy machines that do a bazillion things, and pretty much 98 percent of the time (or more) all we do is use the straight stitch and sometimes the zigzag?   Well, when I wrote my book, Threadwork Unraveled, I included a section to teach folks how to play with their fancy stitches. This is the project in the book and the regular class project.

Decorative Stitch sampler for my Decorative Stitch Class.

I teach that section as a class which was offered this year at Quilt Festival.  This year I came up with a couple new projects as class options for students. Most of the students did the usual tossed leaves project for this class, but one loved my Funky Chicken.   Here she is early in the day, filling the background with fun stitch combinations in fun colors:

This student used the same colors as my sample. We were luckily in the Janome classroom with the FABULOUS 15000 machines. I’ve never been a fan of computer-screen sewing machine models, as I prefer visual knobs and buttons. Well, let me tell that has changed! I have severe sewing machine lust for one of these babies! And they have even more (!!!) stitches than the already fabulous 8900!

Other students put their own spin on the leaves:

A student is making sample blocks with decorative stitches.  This is a great way to test out pattern combinations–here she has a practice square to toss out and her “real” piece on the left.  If you have a practice square, that means you don’t have to pick out the stitches if you don’t like them!

Close up of decorative stitching on an aspen leaf.

This student tried a very bold, wide multi-stitch zigzag.  You can see this is her practice bit–see how she has tested the appearance of various stitches in the strip on the right?

I made a smaller (about 9 inches square) quiltlet with the sampler leaf and the background stitching. If you right click on this image, you can see more detail. Notice how I layered up stitches to applique the green patch and how I used a decorative stitch on the binding. On the latter, I used matching thread to machine stitch down the binding, then went over that with a decorative stitch.

And a happy student with her nearly-done funky chicken:

Thank you, Barb Brown of Colorado, for taking my class! I love your chicken!

The day ended with one of my favorite things at Festival:  FRIENDS!  This evening was the Dinner@8 artists.  Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison curate an exhibit each year for several years now, and I am thrilled to have been both invited to submit pieces and accepted in the exhibit!   My orca quilt, seen in earlier blogposts on Festival 2013, was in this year’s Exquisite Moment exhibit.  Here a bunch of us who were at Festival enjoy dinner and friendship and art!

One of the two tables of folks in the Dinner@8 exhibit. Leslie is at the head of the table, next to Diane Rusin Doran (in pink), Susan Brubaker Knapp (glasses) and Lyric Kinard

And too much fun not to include, Susan and I taking pictures of each other taking pictures!

A brief interlude to entertain you while I slam away at finishing a quilt.  Entries are due Thursday….and it’s not half quilted.  EEEK!   Anyway, for all you Whovians, I spotted this on Gloria Hansen’s blog (here):

The artwork is just wonderful–I’d love to teach myself and practice enough to have that level of fluidity and spontaneity in my drawings.

Hopefully I’ll be back soon with more  quilts from Houston and a sneak peek at what I’ve been doing…..