The other day on the Lazy Girls Yahoo group list, someone mentioned making notebook covers, so of course I piped up about mine. In addition to the group book in my earlier post, I have these “notebook” covers. Three are made to fit the usual 5×8 (or thereabouts) mini-legal-pad size pads of paper (I actually prefer the quadrilles, the ones that look like graph paper…which means I can also use the notebook landscape orientation as well as portrait..but we all know I’m a bit odd…).

One of the first things we did in our Frayed Edges mini-group was a notebook swap. There was an article in Threads magazine in early 2005 on these, so we each made one, then took turns drawing out of a paper bag to pick one. I got the one Deborah made from her art cloth. She does all this fun stuff with embroidery floss and beads, and I’m so happy to have this one as my “Frayed Edges” notebook (note the frayed fabric!):

And here is maybe the best part…the inside cover:

I have this thing about nautiluses, so I made one, well, a couple, like this using some cloth I had painted, free-motion zigzagged the nautilus, and quilted the daylights (like usual!) out of everything.

I decided to write up a pattern to sell (but of course still haven’t printed it up for sale…sigh), and used the loon block from my “Loon-y About Maine” pattern (available here, just scroll down) for the cover.

I added a little pocket on the back for a pen, but am not sure I will ever use it!

Then, I recently made this cover for a 1 1/2 inch ring binder. The image of Mount Fuji is a postcard which I stitched on later. First, I cut fabric the size I needed for the cover (the same fabric wraps all the way around from inside back cover to back to spine to front to inside front. The outside is quilted, but the inside-covers are not. Before stitching the “pockets” but after quilting I sewed the fabric postcard and fabric “namecard” to the front. I also added a pocket to the inside front cover.

The Fabric postcards are made using Peltex as a base, fused and quilted, and have yarn couched to the outside edges.

This is what my studio looks like while a work is in progress … since this “work” is a huge chair, it is a huge mess. The studio, by the way, is the room over the garage …l ots of footprint, but short on wall space (all angles). But it is the brightest room in the house and I love having “my” space!

In this photo, Thumper the cat of 25 toes (yes, cats usually have 16 plus the two dewclaws) is making sure that the pieces set aside don’t slide off the bed. Ahem!

I always wondered how they made those cool vertical channels in chairs. Here is what the chair looked like in the beginning (well…the seat cushion is not on in this photo, but you get the idea):

My favorite chair growing up is a wing-back chair with channels. Mom still has it and I hope to inherit it some day…. Anyway, when I “deconstructed” the hippo chair, I found out how they do it. No, it is not tunnels of one fabric stitched to a single backing, or fabric nailed (literally) to a backing. Rather, they take two pieces of fabric for each “channel” : the surface/decorative fabric and a sturdy backing, in my case tan twill (for the backing, the previous upholsterer used nasty leftovers that clearly had been taken off of someone else’s old furniture…ick!).

Each channel is cut separately with a matching backing piece. These two pieces are sewn wrong sides together. Then you sew each channel to the next on the seamline. Then, you slice open the backing fabric up the center of the channel (being careful NOT to cut the front!) and insert batting. In my chair, they used old fashioned cotton upholstery batt, which these days is getting hard to find. One place tried to sell me something as “cotton”, but when it got here it was icky old polyester that will matt down….they said everyone uses it now. Wrong. That’s why most modern furniture looks good for maybe a year, then looks like….well, I won’t use that kind of language on this blog. Ahem. I finally found a local upholster who had the real cotton stuff and would sell me some…nice man!

Anyway, you make a “sausage” of cotton batt, place it inside the channel, overlap the sliced open backing, and sew shut. Here’s a close-up, with the top corner turned back so you can see the stuffing. By overlapping the backing, the back side is narrower, creating the rounded front side of the channel (think of a cross-section of the channel as a “D” shape, which the flat side going to the back of the chair).

Here, I’ve turned the seat back over to show you what it looks like with just two of the channels stuffed, and the rest unfilled.

I also finished the seat cushion, and have cut out the remaining pieces. I think I am done with the sewing, and once the kids are in school on Monday (and some Christmas presents ordered in the morning), I will head back down to the living room (the chair is WAY too big and heavy to haul upstairs) to start re-assembling it, from the seat on up.

And Eli has been asking to make snickerdoodles, so instead of disrupting the sanctum of football on Sunday with nail-pounding, we made cookies. Here is the master chef at work (mostly nibbling the sweet butter-sugar-flour batter):

And tomorrow, the other notebook covers….

Not too long after my mini-group, the Frayed Edges, started meeting, we decided to do a round robin of sorts, but instead 0f each of us doing a part of a single quilt someone (OK….my friends, I know you are reading this…who remembers how this began…Deborah, was it you? Kate? Kathy?) suggested we each do a book, and do pages for each other.

We each picked a size and a theme. Deborah picked numbers, Kate picked hands, Kathy picked the sea, and I picked (sigh) Aphrodesiac foods. I had just read Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende. In it Allende writes about foods that are reputed to be aphrodesiacs in various cultures and times in history. I thought it would be a total hoot to make a quilt that looks oh-so-wholesome (think fruits and vegetables), but is in fact about aphrodesiacs. I still may do that, but for the book I shared with my friends with the instructions to use a food f rom Isabel’s list, or any food they thought ought to be an aphrodesiac.

For example, Papayas are not on Isabel’s list. How could such a lush, seductive, delectable fruit laden with so many fertile seeds not be on the list? So I added it…on the cover! The photo on p. 48 of the current issue of Quilting Arts (about to hit mailboxes and newsstands if it hasn’t gotten there already) is way better than mine, here, but you get the idea! I bought a scrapbook, then made a cover for it.

These are the first pages inside, with a collaged list of the fruits, vegetables, meats, drinks and such that are in Aphrodite.

The first page I received was from Deborah. I hadn’t intended the scrapbook pages to remain, but Deborah took the idea and ran with it gloriously. She loves artichokes, which are on the list, so she made this incredible collage of an artichoke from magazine papers:

On the back of the page (on the left side in the photo below), Deborah (clever lady this one!) went to the home store and picked up paint chips that had a food in the name of the color and made this funderful piece of stitched together paint chips!!!!

The next month, it was Kathy Daniel‘s turn, and she picked mussels (her thing about the sea! in her quintessential blues) for one side of the page, on the right side in the photo above, and pomegranate for the reverse:

Then at last it was Kate Cutko’s turn. She LOVES her lattes and coffee, so she made this piece, which I love to bits because it reminds me so much of her cards that I love. On the back (below) she even “signed” it with real coffee cup rings!

Hannah wasn’t part of our group when we did this swap, but she is now, and we are going to work on another round for our books with the goal of having them done in time for our show at the Camden Public Library in August 2007. Hannah has picked “motherhood” as her theme (she has three girls and is in the process of adopting one more!)..perfect!

WOOOHOOOO! Yep….we are in Quilting Arts Winter 2006 issue, starting on page 48! And having turned ourselves nearly black and blue pinching ourselves in disbelief, we are thrilled with the article, the photos, the whole shebang. The issue is this one–and if you don’t have it, click on the hotlink here to order a copy, or check your local newsstand, Barnes & Noble, Borders, even eQuilter.com.

Over a year ago it was, I think, I spoke with Patricia Bolton, the editor, and mentioned the Frayed Edges after she mentioned that Quilting Arts would be having an article each issue about mini-groups, where artists get together to work and offer constructive criticism, friendship, support, you name it. In August, Patricia wrote to me, and soon everything snowballed into an article…WOW! THANK YOU! Cate Prato did a fabulous job distilling the tons of information into a few pages, yet capturing the essence of us as a group…great job!

The article opens with my “group” album (more on that tomorrow–I’ve taken photos of the pages inside which are the best part…made by the other Frayed Edges…we each have a book and have taken turns making pages for one another, and plan another round before our group show at the Camden Library in August 2007) and a detail of my “Earth and Turquoise” quilt.

The next page shows a quintessential Kathy Daniels quilt, and you can see more of her work at her blog Studio in the Woods.

Kate Cutko’s fun Moondance quilt is on the next page, and I’m thrilled at how well the quilting shows up in it. Kate is half of Adoption Day Cards, and many of their cards and gift items (like her perpetual calendar) are great for families than haven’t adopted kids, too.

The next two pages feature Deborah Boschert and Hannah Beattie’s joint effort, a small red quilt. When Deborah first met Hannah, they were puttering about Hannah’s basement painting workspace, when Deborah spotted what Hannah had overlooked…this incredible surface-designed cloth! Deborah took it home and quilted it up (Hannah is new to quilting, but has so many incredible ideas and talents that we are cross-pollinating like mad!) And to finish up the article, a full-page picture of Deborah’s Encrusted Cairn. You can see lots more of Deborah’s work at her blog and website, and I just today received the book of hers that I ordered, and I LOVE IT!

The ten percent quilty…. the opening sequence to the new Bond movie, Casino Royale, had me thinking of spirographs, growing vines, and what Robbi Eklow‘s gears quilts would look like if they moved…. all sorts of wonderful quilt inspiration (including how to use the suit of cards
decorative stitches on my machine!). Then the movie started for real…

I’m happy to say that there is, after a two-plus decade absence of a real Bond, a worthy heir to Sean Connery. Now, I will say straight up that even now (and at his current age) Connery has more sex appeal in one sidelong glance than most of the current crop of male actors have in their entire repertory, but we’ve finally got a *real* Bond back. Athletic, wry, good looking enough to be believable, but not so good looking as to be a GQ model. The movie started out with one of the most amazing stunt-man sequences I’ve seen…they earned their pay and talk about raw athleticism…WOW! Then it got better. (Can you tell I liked this movie?)

And the ending was something akin to a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma… heh heh…and I won’t tell you any more. Go see it! Normally, I’m not a major “action movie” fan, but I do like a really good one, and this is definitely a good one! As the movie ended, I said to Paul that this was the best Bond movie in about thirty years.

Yes, Bond is back! Hmmm….hubba hubba!

Cheers, Sarah

PS–here’s one trailer FYI, and another.
Wish I had pics, but don’t dare “borrow” one from the major sites…just go see the movie!