What fun… Quilting Arts magazine is having an online studio tour!   Here‘s a link to the QA website for information on the magazines.  On October 3rd, come back here or to Cate Prato’s blog, here, for links to all the participating artists/studios! FUN!   I’ll be back with pics on Saturday!  (and no, I’m not planning to tidy!)

This past spring, Park City Girl had a great idea:  since we can’t all go to the Quilt Festival in Chicago (spring) or Houston (fall), why not have our OWN show online!  I participated in the spring show, and am thrilled to help sponsor the fall version.  Click on the Bloggers’ Quilt Festival button in the sidebar (below left, just scroll down) or the one just below this paragraph at any time to go see what’s new.  My donation:  a copy of my book, hot of the press!  (More about that in my next post!)

Go visit the blog and join the fun…. think about what is your favorite quilt, share a link (when the fun begins on October 9th), and let’s all enjoy ANOTHER quilt festival…one we can all reach online! Great idea!

No, I haven’t died this time either….just distracted by summer!   I had thought that if I didn’t schedule anything for most of August, I’d be OK.  Wrong…..  here’s the list:

• clean up messes from making Be Inspired
• send entry to Houston
• send quilts to AQS for photography
• do all final edits on book, send to AQS
• paint plywood piece that serves as a coffee table top on the back porch
• calculate yardage to make cushion covers for back porch settee and 2 rockers, but decide not enough disposable income yet to pay for the fabric….
• exchange sometimes five e-mails a day with editor (by the way, things are going very well!)
• prepare entries for local gallery show (and got accepted!)
• exercise regularly and continue to diet
• go on a ten mile bike ride–the longest since before I was pregnant with Eli who is now 11–and it wasn’t bad!!!! Reward:  ice cream! (SMALL cone)
• pay bills
• order supplies / items to sell when teaching in Houston
• help Joshua make a totebag/purse for his girlfriend…it was HIS idea!  (pictures and blogpost to come I hope)
• take Eli to buy binders etc. on school supply list
• take Joshua, Eli and J’s girlfriend to an amusement park (UGH) that is 2 1/2+ hours drive south of us; the good news:  it was SO HOT that after 3 hours, looking at looming thunderclouds, the kids asked “mom, can we leave and go to the Mall and do school clothes shopping instead.”  So we did… air conditioning, and three long road-trips (the only really big, really good mall in Maine–which would qualify as an average everday mall in the DC suburbs where I used to live–is near Portland and a 2+ hour drive from our house) turned into just one!
• prepare for dyeing fabric day with Frayed Edges (pictures and blogpost to come)
• have dyeing day with Frayed Edges and celebrate Kath’s birthday, dye shirts with Joshua and his girlfriend
• next day:  more fabric dyeing, including tie-dye with the teens and Eli
• massive house cleaning, including dragooning the entire family into the process.  House is somewhat less cat- and dog-hairy.  Sigh.
• start prepping kits for teaching classes in Houston
• start thinking about a few new samples for teaching in Houston
• prepare invoices for wholesale pattern sales to local store and for Middle school / Be Inspired quilt
• meeting with Middle School principal, who fortunately LOVES the Be Inspired, Panel 1, and is now all excited about fundraising again for the project, and (from previous efforts) can pay me some of the price on the first panel….hooray!  What a concept…getting paid!
• do all the paperwork (well, it was online but it is still paperwork) to be able to accept credit cards in Houston when I teach, order knucklebasher machine and credit card slips and metal imprint plate
• eat lunch with mom every week; she is still in assisted living, but her confusion grows weekly.  She is having an increasingly difficult time recalling names of things (including my kids…but she still asks about them every time…. sometimes every five minutes….), so sometimes it is a challenge to sit for an entire lunch that repeats the same few minutes of   conversation / answers to questions every few minutes, again and again.  I just remind myself the questions are new to her, even though she just asked them.  She can’t help it if she doesn’t remember…..I PRAY I take after my dad instead….
• take some time for myself, read Melanie Testa’s Inspired to Quilt (hope that will be a blogpost/review too)… it is excellent!
• try to keep up on e-mail; accept that I will never read all the blogs I would like to, or keep up with the news as well as I would like
• Revise “resources” section of the book
• List subjects for an index to the book

And that’s just the past two weeks or so….so that’s my excuse for no new blogposts!!!! Anyone wanna take a nap with me?

To do SOON:

• write next article for Machine Quilting Unlimited (www.mqumag.com) on Color / thread color
• prep more kits
• finish kids’ school clothes shopping, mostly locally
• prepare entry for Mancuso / PIQF show
• prepare entry for the Eye of the Quilter, a photography exhibit at Quilt Festival in Houston
• contact MORE magazines to see if they will accept an article proposal that will help promote the book
• think about book promotion… it should be out in late October/early November
• today:  lunch with Ma, grocery shopping, take Eli to Game Stop and WalMart, buy assorted stuff for house (like light bulbs and toilet paper!!!!!)
• clean house, again
• maybe another long bike ride when the heat wave breaks later this week…..
• get Nourish pattern prepped for printing, contact printer (hi Barbara!), and all that stuff so it is ready to take to Houston
• start some “slide show” stuff to use for class demonstrations for Houston classes
• prep more samples for Bindings class
• make pattern out of Little Brown Bird…send to Kay T. for testing, use for kits for Chunk and Jigsaw class in Houston….
• another nap sounds good; sipping a cup of tea and reading a novel sounds even better…sitting   on the settee on the back porch

A couple of years ago,  I was able to participate in the phenomenally successful FiberArt for a Cause fund-raiser conceived, organized and run by Virginia Spiegel in which all proceeds go to the American Cancer Society.  I donated this quilt, and thank Gold Donor Katherine McNeese for her generosity to the ACS in her donation for the quilt above, A Sense of Place:  The Tree.

The preview for the final installment, Collage Mania, in which all 384 fiber collages donated by 161 generous artists are now available for your viewing HERE.

Collage Mania, a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, opens May 5 with a minimum donation of $80 for each artwork and continues May 6 and 7 when the donation minimum drops to $40.

Please read over the directions on how to participate in Collage Mania. NOW is the time to send me a note if you need special accommodations in any way. Once Collage Mania starts it will be wild and crazy as all artwork is available on a first-come/first-serve basis.

All donations for artwork are made directly to the ACS through Fiberart For A Cause. Patrons receive an immediate electronic receipt from the ACS.  Our goal for this final Fiberart For A Cause fundraiser is at least $20,000. We have already donated over $170,000.

Enjoy the artwork!

Congratulations to Virginia, the small but effective bevy of folks who have joined to help her with artwork for items on Cafe Press, collating and uploading jpegs and preparing the THIRTY NINE pages of collages for this round (among other things), and to all the artists who have participated in the Postcard fundraiser (donations made at the FFAC booth at Quilt Festivals in Houston and Chicago), the several years of Collage Mania, and the several years of the Reverse Auction, and to the generosity of so many who have made this possible.

As you read this, I am teaching in Connecticut, so hope to have some fun class pics soon… in the meantime, there has been another sure sign that it is spring!   The other night as I took ‘Widgeon out for his pre-bed walkies, we must have disturbed someone large up in the tree.  Several LARGE someones.

Looking down the driveway

Here’s the view the next morning down the driveway…follow the blue arrows to two of the large someones… yes, the BUZZARDS are back to roost!  Last spring, at their peak, we had 36 (THIRTY SIX!) just across from us.

I have developed this absurd fondness for the ugly birds, and was sad when they didn’t set up a rookery filled with nests and not-so-little-peeping baby vultures. I am told that you know it is spring when they are here because they need the warm thermals rising from the ground to lift the scent of carrion.  Lovely, eh?  Ahem. Think of them as your friendly neighborhood cleaning crew…

Paul spotted about 14 during ‘Widgeon’s morning walkies, so I trotted out and took these pictures.

Four friends in the trees

These four were soon joined by another from the pine tree next door (they are quite difficult to spot in the shaggy pines).

On a stump on a pine tree trunk

This one guy cooperated tho…

and yet one more:

Sleeping in late....

By the time the sun has risen the birds are  out and on the thermals.  Next, back to quilting….