Our Monday meeting in late January was a welcome respite from the chaos that is my life these days. So much so, that I headed out Route 1 south I found myself talking to myself with glee: “yipppeeee! Girls day out! Girls day away!” Ya think I needed the break? Yep.

The day started nicely, and I stopped at the Starbucks at Cook’s Corner en route to Hannah’s. I went in instead of through the drive-through (and found a gift for hubby for Valentine’s), and found this “art notebook” (above). The trees remind me a bit of Deborah, and I loved the inside (below). But I think I can make a nicer quality one…this was really neat, but I can make it even more fun (and all mine!). Still, I liked it enough to snap pics, and I really liked the embroidered detail on the flap covering the pencil points, which alas you can’t see because I lifted the flap for the photo—smack self upside head!

We met at Hannah’s house, where her youngest took a long nap (and the babysitter was there to boot!), we shared and talked and ate and played, pretty much in that order, except we also ate while sharing! Kath brought muffins and I brought juice (I have fallen in love with the Simply Orange, which tastes like fresh…and the jars are great for mixing dyes, too.) Kathy brought her being-quilted chickadee quilt which she has discussed over on her blog, here. I brought my in-progress Hawaiian style quilt that will be in my book (which will be delayed again as I deal with mom’s decline), and Hannah had these incredible delectables tucked away, but we found them anyway…. I am in LOVE with that tree piece (second photo)!

Hannah had a project she wanted us to try and even had all the supplies… she had seen on Martha how you cover a canvas with your own cloth, Mod Podge it to seal it and glue it to the canvas. Then you take a mask or a stencil and paint around a shape. Here’s Kate working on hers as Hannah starts on our Italian sub sandwiches for lunch:

Of course I couldn’t do what the instructions said…. I decided to tear strips of cloth and have a striped background….

And I was SO inspired by this flyer from the library in Brunswick (or was it the local film / cinema group? It was about movies)… aren’t these incredible graphics? I think I’ll tear masking tape to mask off trees and birds on my striped cloth one before I paint…. but what color? Deep navy? Teal? Silver? That last hadn’t occurred to me until I just typed it, but maybe that’s it…. or a dark metallic gray?

And then there was Kate’s rum cake for dessert….. *almost* needed to worry about a breathelyzer test after that one….grin! And, sigh, we missed Deborah, who always took photos of our feast…..

Hi all…. it has been a crazy week. My mom, who is 89, is not doing so well, so I’ve been trying to help her and care for her long distance (I’m in Maine and she’s in California). That means I may not be able to post as often for the next month or two, so if I appear to vanish, I’m OK…just swamped with life. It looks like everything is going to work out and that she will be able to move to Maine in a month or so. Keep your fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I have some glorious color to share with you! In the pursuit of perfect color for my art quilts, I’m engaged in a color-swatch-swap (try saying that three times fast! pphhhttt!) with Carol Soderlund and some fellow students. The 8 students were in Carol’s totally awesome dyeing workshops (I’ve blogged about them in the past) either this past October or in August 2007. We are in Australia, The Netherlands, Denmark, and across the US, and are each dyeing a different color family. I chose to use a warm yellow, a red  and a blue, and I may have one of the best color families known to procion MX dyers! The photo above is of the first round of dyeing . Here is the yellow after it got out of the dye buckets, washer and dryer:

Then, you add red:

Then turquoise:

Overall the values (light to darkness) are light… the “black” is really a deep eggplant… the colors of the fabrics in the dyebath was awesome. If I take the darker range and go deeper by having more dye powder per ounce of fabric, I can get some really intense blues…. the colors remind me of tropical fruits (citrus, papaya, mango), flowers (hibiscus and fuchsia and orchids), foliage (lush moist as well as arid climate plants) and the sea… from a stormy day to deep Caribbean ultramarine to those glorious aquas in the shallows….

I’ll add more pictures once everything is ironed and sorted by color range….. WOOOT!

Yes, I am alive. Yes, I have been working like a madwoman. Yes, family life happens (and means you don’t get to blog). Yes, I have been teaching. Yes, I have been quilting!

Earlier this week I came across a post on the quiltart list by Sonja Lee, and a link to her blog, Art Textilian, with her contribution to the World Beach Project. WOWIE ZOWIE! Instant inspiration! The Beach project is sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, and a collaboration with artist Sue Lawty. Immediately I wanted to participate, despite the bone-shattering cold this week

So on Friday at sunset when it was about 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus temps in Celcius) with a nice breeze blowing to make it feel chillier, Eli and I went to town to buy Pigwidgeon (the pug)  a birthday present (a new bed), go to the post office, and just before dark (well, as dark was happening at 5 pm) make our piece on the beach. The photo above is of the beach below the library and amphitheatre park. You can see the schooners wrapped for winter and the ice (yes, ice) on the beach at low tide at sunset.

I guess I didn’t read the instructions too well, because the project is supposed to be made of stone, and ours is made of mussel shells, a few rocks, and tumbled, broken bits of brick (so it is totally New England!). When I asked Eli at breakfast if he wanted to do this with me, he asked if we could make the yin and yang if we could find white and black stones, so of course I said yes. Well, he didn’t remember what it was called, but I knew he meant yin-yang. When we got to the beach, he decided red and blue of brick and mussels would be better.

Anyway, I don’t know if our project will make the V&A website since it isn’t exactly mostly rock, but we had fun anyway. It got so dark in the 20 minutes or so that we were freezing our fingertips (some of the shells were frozen to the sand and we had to scrabble to pry them loose!), so I had to photoshop / lighten this last picture so you can actually see both the harbor and our project.

Wowie zowie…. OK… I am so excited that I can’t believe it and had to share before I explode…….Art quilter makes good! I have two projects in Lark Books’ forthcoming book “Creative Quilting with Beads.” I was trying to track down how Quilt Divas, the local quilt shop in Rockland, Maine, can order it at wholesale (we’ll do a book signing and class), so I was on the phone with Lark’s customer service. While speaking to the rep, I remembered Amazon has had a lot of other list-members’ books online before publication date / available for pre-order, so I looked up this book……

MY PROJECT IS ON THE COVER!!!!! At least, the cover that is on the Amazon listing. We’ll hope that it stays the same… I can’t BELIEVE IT……. Me?????!!!!!!! I know that sometimes covers change, but still…… I’ll have to wait until publication to share my own pics of the notebooks and other projects from the Frayed Edges that are included (Lark has first publication rights, including even little old blogdom.)

Anyway, yes, I will have the book available for sale on my website when it is out mid-May-ish (release date is nominally May 6th, but we know those dates slide in both directions). I won’t be able to come close to offering the price Amazon can (it’ll be list price), but I can offer signatures! Eight of the 25 projects are by my mini-group the Frayed Edges, so thought I’d ask them to sign a bunch of copies so folks can have signatures from Kate Cutko, Kathy Daniels and me. (Of the five of us, 4 have projects in the book…3 of the 4 of us with projects in this book; Hannah was right in the middle of selling her house, moving and traveling to adopt a daughter in China at submission deadline, so obviously she was a bit too busy for book projects!) WOOOOHOOOO!

This project is a notebook cover…. I did two versions. This one fits a composition notebook, so it is vertical orientation. The other one is also pomegranates but with lime green and yellow for the table and wall and fits a 6×9 ish (whatever the standard size is) sketchbook / journal with a horizontal format. I chose those two items since they are standard size here in the US and readily available, but it would be easy-peasy to adapt the pattern to other shapes/sizes.

Anyway, I just HAD to share….now I can’t wait more than ever to see the finished book!

So what do you do? If you are me, you quilt. If you are a cat or honorary cat (the pug), you sleep by the woodstove! Hmmm… wonder if they’d make ME and honorary cat and let me join them?

Here’s what I was doing while they were sleeping… I added the pillow backing and bound my “quilt.” This is the extra block from my Nourish quilt. You saw this piece a few days ago unquilted…. well, I finally got some studio time (what little there was this week), and got this piece quilted in time to share at my Intro to machine quilting class yesterday at Quilt Divas in Rockland. Although I am probably better known (to the small extent that anyone knows who I am) for art quilts, I totally love, Love, LOVE Hawaiian quilts. I am also not one known for liking symmetry, either, but something about them sings to me.

I designed a large-ish quilt (about 68×68) for my book called Nourish the Body, Nourish the Soul, which features Ulu (breadfruit), Taro and Pineapple blocks (the Nourish the Body part), and Bird of Paradise and Plumeria (and I hope heaven smells like that, making the rash assumption I’ll get there)…. I ended up placing the Plumeria block in the center of the big quilt, which meant the other plumeria block was the odd man out. Blocks are 18 inches square, and I added a 3/8″ inner sashing and 3 1/2″ border. If you click on the photo, you’ll get a larger view. Hope you like!