sooner or later

This was about the third attempt at making glue paper or paper fabric or fabric paper - whatever you call it. Technique has been around for years, in a lot of books and magazines; I just never tried it. Don't know what I'm going to do with it next. It's fairly flexible. I was thinking about covering a small box.

Protect your worktable with freezer paper, shiny side up. Lay on a layer of scrim - mine was already a lavendar. Next I squirted on a wiggly line of very diluted Elmer's white glue and with a nasty old brush I spread that around on the fabric. Some wrinkles formed. I left them there. Dropped some space dyed cotton yarn here and there. Misted a bit of water on those. Crinkled up a piece of white tissue paper and sort of flattened it out again and laid that on top of the yarn. Sqiggled on more diluted glue and brushed that on. Nasty brush caught and tore the tissue a bit. Left it. Squirted on some Lumiere (russet), misted with more water and brushed that around some, more tearing. Left it to dry for 20 hours or so. Peeled it up off the freezer paper. Scanned it over a piece of red cardstock.

I have a lot of this scrim. I have a lot of tissue. I have a lot of yarn. I could turn this out plenty fast if I get a finished product idea firmed up....

I planned to stitch up a storm last night, but instead I watched the SofU speech. Monday morning, I fused some rusted fabric and other fabrics in ripped strips onto Peltex. It's going to be ATCs once I get it all quilted to death.

Last weekend was shorter than usual. We spent some time looking at dining sets. I want to replace our old one, it's falling apart and we can't seem to find what we want for the secret budget that the grill king has in mind. I would love a set of old library chairs. I think we should hit the flea markets next. We did see a wonderful granite table on powder coated aluminum at Sam's. It's an outdoor set - the chairs are comfortable but too huge for my dining room and our outdoor area doesn't require anything that fancy. So if we bought that for outside, I would be stuck with the old stuff in the house and you can't eat outside that many times during the year. It wouldn't be worth it. The table is way too heavy and would be impossible to move if it was in the dining room when we need more room for the holiday tree or whatever. Rats, I hate shopping.

Then the kids came over for grilled burgers and general messing about on Sunday. Grandkids are growing up too fast - I must take photos next time.

uh-huh, those are purple frogs, ma'am. Like this one..

And here's the dress I made from this fabric back in the day....
Never throw your favorite stuff away. You can make new stuff with it.

We've been having sunny crisp days lately. Perfect for gardening, but I have no big outdoor planting projects planned for this year. Just waiting for the squirrels to finish tilling the raised beds looking for nuts.

I do want to finish the quarter circle patio, but we still have big tree roots to remove and a decision to be made on the kind of surface to put down. If we wait, the idea will come to us. Or I'll give up and just let the grass grow back.

There is what looks like an opening between my garden and the neighbor's that Peter Rabbit would have made. It is smooth from the belly of some animal who prefers to sneak under fences than run along the top rail. There is a ghostly white cat that creeps behind the garage occasionally when I drive in at night. Perhaps this is her escape route.

I finished some swapping projects this weekend. Struggled with the decorations - still more to put away. I know they multiply while out of the boxes. Every year I have to find more boxes to store them all. Cleaned out a drawer and tossed out some stuff and have to find homes for other things.

This afternoon we will be lunching at Chuck E. Cheese's table by invitation. Short people will be running around in circles, much screaming and giggling to be heard.



My grandson found a frog for me at Chuckie's place.

Birthday frogs ready to hop out of town. These are two inch squares and I really am glad I finally bought some Peltex. Makes all the difference in the edge stitching. I thought it was some kind of fancy machine, or the right attachment or knowing the perfect technique - but no, it's just buying the right interfacing! I also used a dab of watered down glue at each corner before I trimmed the thread ends. Tidy counts when the piece is tiny.

The background was once a shirt which became a rag and sopped up some fabric paint a long time ago. I'm glad I finally found the perfect use for it.

Before I put the binding on it, I looked at the July journal quilt and decided my daughter was right. It wasn't really me and so I cut the darn thing up. So now I have finished a completely different project and one with a deadline. With a little tweaking, this will become my postcards for the Romance swap. They're mostly red, with hearts on each one of the three. I printed out a card stock back and fused and stitched it on. They are ready to be mailed. I should probably hit them with a bit of spray sealer since it is inkjet printing and it's raining here again. More photos later after the tweaking.



On Sharon B's CQ blog (see link in my right sidebar), she is looking for comments to help her decide on her 2008 challenge. She has a large readership and motivates a lot of people to stitch more. I put in my vote for a finishing-up-projects kind of a challenge but mostly the votes are going in the pocket of a design thing. I want to see the hanging chad on this ballot. Oh, well, I suppose I must struggle on alone in my quest to find the bottom of the stack of the stuff I want to finish.

Here are the ATCs I'm sending out as birthday greetings. I now have a lot of scraps already to be made into plus-size inchies. I fussy cut out the frogs from the background. Why didn't I get this project done before the Quilt Festival - it would have been so much more practical than cutting inchies out of other fabric. Now I just hate to throw the scraps out because it is already spraybasted together but I can't save everything. I will make as many as I can tonight and then the rest goes immediately into the trash. And I don't want to hear about children in foreign lands who don't have enough fabric.

I have heeded the advice on ATCs and put rounded corners on these. I hate the messy square corners on my postcards and this seems to be a better choice. I also loved stitching the waves around the frogs.

International Quilt Festival

So the jars of fate were on my side! My name was drawn for the one class I would have time to take at Make It University - the delightfully fun part of the International Quilt Festival sponsored by Quilting Arts and ClothPaperScissors Magazines.

Click on the photo to see a few more photos of the fun. I will be adding more later. I took more than 75 photos in the Journal Quilt area. Amazing work there, as always. But this year, I feel like I "know" some of these women, having listened and learned a lot on the QuiltArt Forum.

I met up with a weaving friend, Nancy, and a yahoo friend, Margaret, for lunch and we made more friends while sharing our table with other quilters who joined us. So much to talk about, so much to see. I feel like I need to take a week off from work and really DO the festival next year. I missed preview night (Halloween festivities not to be missed!) and the Friday night QuiltArt reception (traffic horrors which I wish I had missed!) and had to leave early for an event on Saturday night.

Today, my daughter and I go the festival again. Shopping and more photos in my future. Maybe another class if the jars of fate are generous. I'll be wearing my lucky coin purse necklace again today and passing out MEOW Cards. They're sorta copy cats of the MOO cards which I think are cool. The cards have a photo of the coin purse, my email, blog address and the link to the instructions for the coin purse on Handwoven's website. I foisted them off to anyone who commented on my little purse necklace.

One woman asked how long did it take to make the coin purse and I said, well, after you have the two-inch wide wire warp threaded onto your 45-inch-wide, $3,000+ loom, it only takes about an hour to make the whole thing. She was a good sport and laughed along wtih us. I told her if she was really interested I would give her instructions on how to weave it on a picture frame but it would be a little more free-form and less gridlike. We'll see if she really wants to make one badly enough to email me.

... for the October crowd.

For a swap that isn't due yet!!! I'm done early. Amazing.