Eli’s soccer season ended well, with a 3-game round robin up in Waterville on a warm and sunny late October Sunday. Here’s the happy team at the end of the three games…they won two of the matches.

Eli lost his good new school shoes, and we had incredible ice cream at John’s in Liberty on the ride home. Before that, Eli (number 17, in the middle) was his usual scrappy, go-for-it self on the field:

He had a couple of amazing saves as goalie during one game (securing a victory for his team!), and after the game Coach Gross gave all the boys medals for being great team players:

The team had a fun bowling party to celebrte the end of the season and thank their coaches. Eli helped Kienan’s littlest brother, Cam (in the green) with his first attempt to bowl:

Now Eli’s back to his regular schedule of karate, until wrestling starts in December, at which point he’ll split his time again. He’s doing really well in school, and reading way above grade level (types his proud mama!).

Oh my goodness! I downloaded pictures yesterday from my camera, and it has been TWO WEEKS! I don’t think I’ve ever gone that long without downloading since I got a digital camera years ago! Well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on the manuscript for my book (still not done, of course… and every time I look at it, it seems as though there is more to do, not less….sigh). I’ve been working on a quilt for an invitational show called “It’s Good to be Green.” (If you read Gerrie Congdon’s blog, you’ll have heard her mention it, too….). There was Halloween, teaching quilting, and Joshua’s surgery, then Joshua’s 14th birthday. Egads! No wonder I’m tired. And oh yeah, the Coastal Quilters holiday bazaar!

I can’t share a lot of the “Green” quilt, but can share some so will do that tomorrow or in a few days I think. In the meantime, some updates on the family. As a teen, Joshua is too old for trick or treating, but he did go to town and have fun with shaving cream with friends:

Here’s Joshua getting ready to have all the hardware removed from his leg…

And a last shot of the hardware–we got the pieces (after they were sterilized) back in a bag, and I want to put it together and make Joshua a windchime or paperweight out of it LOL!

And here’s what was on the ceiling of the pre-op room—fun!

Then there was the birthday. He LOVES pumpkin pie, so guess what he always wants instead of cake! I started buying number candles for the boys (each has his own set), with 1 for the first (duh) and adding the zero when they hit 10. Now I just grab the appropriate numbers from the candle bag (they borrow their brother’s “1” for age 11)

Next post: Eli and the pug!

Oh boy! Deborah (whom many of you know from her blog) took some wonderful “Neighborhood” shots for me of my 2007 Journal art quilt hanging at Quilt Festival in Houston this year. Mine is in the center, bottom row, in soft green. The pipe and drape walls are a standard height..about 8 feet. The white pages you see to the left of each journal are our written journals to accompany the quilt.

For those who don’t know, Journal quilts are wonderful little art quilts. In past years we have done a single small journal, the size of a piece of copy paper, each month for January through September. This year, the final year of the Journal Quilt Project (organized by Karey Bresenhan and the good folks of Quilts Inc., who put on the “Mecca” shows in Houston, Chicago and now Long Beach), we were to make a single larger quilt 17×22 (same as four sheets together). For more info about my 2007 journal quilt and the book about the journal quilt project, check this link and this one for the book review. For a link to many on-line images of the 2007 journal quilts, click here or here.

Here’s a close-in shot of my journal. If you look closely, VERY closely, you can barely see the black hanging sleeves. IQA (International Quilt Association… www.quilts.org) does a brilliant job at hanging, because you never really see / notice the hanging apparatus. Instead, the emphasis is on the quilts. By using black drapes, black rods, blackened chains, and covering the ends of the large rods (on the larger quilts…not in this photo) with cloth sleeves made from the same fabric as the curtains, the hanging apparatus just disappears allowing viewers to focus on the quilts.

And here is a “wide angle” view of the neighborhood. When I first went to quilt shows and took photos for people of their quilts hanging, I did what everyone else does: take a picture of the quilt. Then when I got into shows too far away to visit, I realized what I really wanted was not a picture of my quilt (after all, I know what it looks like!) but a picture of what it looks like in the venue. These pictures from Deborah are exactly that!  You can also see that IQA covers the light  poles and cinder blocks with black, too, helping light the quilts (the ceiling and lights of the convention center are about a mile above the quilts) without being obtrusive.

I can see my quilt, see my neighbors, and get a nice feel for the show and exhibit area.  Thank you Deborah!

Need good ideas for holiday gifts (or just because?)?  Well, have I got two great things for you–an e-Book to delight and inspire and beautiful items to use, enjoy art AND fundraise for cancer research all at the same time!

Virginia Spiegel had an idea: to raise funds for cancer research, one fabric postcard at a time, through a project she called FiberArt for A Cause (FFAC). That little idea grew and grew and grew, and to date she (with a lot of support from a lot of artists, happy customers and supporters, and a lot of hard work) has raised over $135,000! Yes, that is ONE HUNDRED, thirty five THOUSAND dollars donated directly to the American Cancer Society. The tulip photo above is one of Virginia’s (all photos used here with permission) that is featured in both her e-book and at her Cafe Press store to continue her fundraising efforts…read on for more info!

Next, Virginia has had several on-line auctions of art, and I was proud to donate a piece in honor of my dad, half-brother, and friend Linda. You can read more about The Wall here and here. And you can see the gallery from the 2007 auction here.

Now, Virginia has two more projects to help raise funds to fight cancer! First, she has compiled some of her newsletters into an e-book “Art Nature Creativity Life.” To read a sample chapter, click here. I am not normally a fan of e-books…I’m sort of old fashioned and like things on paper (it is that tactile thing that draws me to cloth, too!). But this book is glorious, and features not only her art quilts but also her photography–I’m so glad she posted a chapter online because now I believe! Here is one photo from a chapter of the e-Book, showing a bit of Virginia’s art journal:

Every year Virginia and her sister go camping and canoeing in the Boundary Waters, and it is a chance for me to escape with them. The book has received rave reviews all around, and it would make a perfect Christmas gift for the person in your life who has everything, has been touched by cancer, or could use a momentary escape to beauty and art (and who doesn’t need that?)!

Her latest endeavor is another treat: FFAC gift items from CafePress, here. I’ve already ordered my Boundary Waters shirt and am starting my Christmas shopping list.

There are shirts, mugs, mousepads and totes in three different designs. All the profits from each item ($5) are donated directly to the American Cancer Society. Thanks to Virginia for her dedication to this cause, and for making it possible for all of us to share in her art and joy in the beauty of nature.

In the grand tradition of saving the best for last, here are pictures from our final day when we got to share our work. Some of these pieces (not mine alas) easily qualify as art cloth; others, like mine, will wend their way into art quilts.

On days three and four, we did an exercise with four (or more) pieces of cloth. In all four cases, we used the same dye mixture–in my case a plum-magenta-ish color. Your color needed to be one that used at least a tiny bit of each of three primaries in a color family (i.e. you had yellow, red and blue in the dye-mix). The first piece of cloth in this sequence was dyed with the complete mix of the color. First you needed to manipulate your fabric (I pleated mine simply by making tucks along the bias), then coil it up in a plastic container, then apply the dye.

For the second piece in the series, you selected a highlight color. You then applied the highlight to the cloth first, let it set a spell and then add dye activator, then add the final color(s). The next two manipulations were similar, with the fourth one using the color’s complement as the “highlight.” The photo above is of my four pieces. I also dyed two scraps of silk and a scrap of cotton using the poured off, activated dye from the various sequences. As expected, the color was pale to non-existent compared to the main samples. Here’s a closer view–the silks may be two of the ugliest pieces of cloth I’ve made in a long time, but there is always over-dye and paint!

Now that I know what Carol was after, I know I would choose my starting color differently, and it would be a LOT more like what Wil Opio Oguta and my table-make Lasha (from Denmark) did. Here is Wil’s sequence…heavenly!

And Wil holding up one of the pieces…luminescent!

Lasha dyed a large piece of lightweight china silk in addition to her cotton pieces; it is remarkable that the piece went home with her… I was sure it wanted to come home with me!

And here is Lasha’s sequence:

And finally, a close-up (can you tell I love the fracturing that happened?!):

One couple attended, both of whom weave and dye yarn. The same principles used to dye cotton cloth apply to any cellulose fiber, like yarn! Lew used a different colorway and manipulation that gives a very different effect:

Finally, here is one of Nancy’s pieces. She rolled the cloth from the corner, then twisted, then coiled and ended up with a wonderful wavy rolling texture. The more white area is from what was in the center of the roll. I can see doing this, perhaps on the lengthwise grain, to create a sea texture that shades from light to dark. You could do one round of dyeing to get the waves and coils and shading, then overdye the entire piece with a lighter value of the same (or a related) color to create a real “Seascape” for use in an art quilt. All it takes it time!

And, alas, I’m not sure whose pieces these are, but I wish they had jumped in my suitcase too!!!!  (Update…these are Beth  Polvino’s…  gorgeous!)

So you wanna go take a class with Carol? It is expensive…class fee, materials, kit fees, transportation, lodging, food, purchases of dyestuffs and auxiliaries you just can’t go home without, but my oh my is it worth it. I’m now trained for years…all I have to do is make time to put it into practice and begin to master the processes!