Fabric addicts paradise

My name is Carol and I'm addicted to fabric.

I love shopping for it, looking at it and petting it. I love it so much that I take the time to cut it up in little pieces and sew it back together just so I can get more of a "fix".

So when a co workers friend asked if I wanted some she didn't want anymore of course I said yes.

Today I went to pick it up and was aghast, floored, shocked and in awe!

This filled up my trunk and my back seat - we are talking good quality cottons in yardage.

I am in fabric heaven :-) and she has more

 

I'm still futzing (is that a word?) around with this mountain warrior, doing a new one. Thought about a close up branch, but didn't like this. Someone on twitter said it looks like the poor girl is being hit by lightning ;-)

 

Someone else took the pic and drew this branch on and tweeted it back. I like this a lot better.

Twitter is great for bouncing ideas around.

 

I may just leave it alone and be done. Right now, it's going up on the design wall to ponder.

 

Right now I need to go for a walk, it's getting really pretty here in Vermont.

Quilt On!

Mountain warrior WIP

Been working on this landscape and will be making a digital pattern of it to sell on craftsy.

I think I need to tweak it a bit to make the rocks part look more like a cliff. And I felt it needed something on the left to balance out the action on the right so those trees are supposed to look like tree tops? Do they? Would it be better to have just some bare trunks with no evergreen foliage?

I'm linking this to Nina's off the wall Friday (button on the right of this blog) and you gals are very artistic and have great advice so any input or ideas you can give me will be appreciated :-)

Glen from quilts and dogs blog has thrown down the gauntlet to a butt glove challenge duel and above is the start of that, I know it looks very strange but wait until next week. It'll be worth the wait.

 

My days off this week, Thursday and Friday are positively perfect in the weather a area - high 70's, no humidity, wall to wall sun. Yesterday I went to button bay to visit my parents and we rented a couple of kayaks - very fun! Today I'll take the dogs to a natural area on the river so I don't know how much quilting Ill get done but here in Vermont we have to savor every last minute of this weather since it'll be the last for many many months.

scraptitude begins

I must be out of my mind but I am going to attempt to make a queen sized scrap quilt.

There I've said it, I've posted this and now I must forge ahead. Sandy over at quilting for the rest of us is posting the directions for a scrap mystery quilt that her guild is doing and some of my twilter friends on twitter are doing it so I thought it would be fun to join them. 

go to sandy's blog here to check it out - I have alot of fabric that has just been sitting and this is a good way to use up stuff I that I've been hording for years accumulating.

So after a few nightmares about cutting up 864 squares and some nudging from sandy announcing a linky party showing our progress (of which I had none)

and after a nice fall day walk to clear my head

I proceeded to cut and chain sew - and you know what - it felt good!

kind of going back to my roots, I'de forgotten the pleasure you get from this pedal to the medal sewing and the beauty of scraps. Now I haven't cut all 864 squares, not even close - just well I haven't counted but maybe two handfuls of 2 1/2 inch squares mainly to see how the background will work that I picked.

I couldn't decide on a background and so after spending an hour at joannes, I picked this pumpkin orange - a color that I dislike have never used before in my life. But this is a project of getting out of my rut, so I said to myself - just go for it - and I did - and I like it :-)

Why don't you join us on this mystery quilt - but I warn you 

YOU MUST HAVE LOTS OF SCRAPTITUDE!

:-)

You've always had the power

I made this for the banned book challenge. If you want to participate, there's still lots of time! Go here to find out about it. It's really a fun challenge especially if you're a book lover.

 

Of course it's from The wizard of Oz by L.Frank Baum

It doesn't show up on alot of banned book lists but it has had it's share of narrow minded people wanting to block readers from the wonders and great moral lessons of this book. Go here to read more about that.

To me the whole story can be summed up in the words of Glenda the good - who I think was named after a certain basset life saver in Louisiana ( you know who you are)

Anyway, Dorothy and her crew went through this whole ordeal following that yellow brick road and fighting off flying monkeys and evil witches to try to get home when she always had the power to get home all along. Kind of like the key to happiness, the way we work to try to be richer and prettier to be happy when the key to happiness is within us to begin with.

 

So to make this little quilt I needed a yellow brick for the road, so I took a red brick fabric that had the right scale and just used some yellow acrylic paint mixed with water to make it yellow.

 

For the writing, I backed the yellow spiral piece with a heavy fusible interfacing, drew out the wording in pencil and then FMQ the writing. That way if I screwed up the writing, I could easily do over. I went over it twice to make it show up nicely.

 

Added some yarn single crotchet all around, then added some bling because ....... Well I have the power.

I thought as was done but looking at the photo, I realized the shoes need bows! I knew something was off.

Right now they sorta look like slut shoes - bows will make them power shoes

:-)

 

Tribute to Bubba

I have a quilter animal lover friend on twitter that has a beautiful senior golden retriever that has some health issues. The last photo she posted of him on twitter just had me melting, he is one of those dogs you just want to go up to and hug. I was compelled to try to make an art quilt - I won't say of him because when you see the photo, my quilt isn't all that much like the photo as he is more reddish in life but will say mu quilt is inspired by Bubba "the golden one".

 

The golden one

This is Bubba - he is beloved by his family so gets lots of hugs

To make my version of Bubba, I printed out his photo, then traced the his basic lines on the photo with a thick black sharpie. This goes thru the paper to the other side, so I can see it better being black on white. I should have a photo of this part but wasn't thinking about describing it, just doing it:-) I then took a white cotton and traced those lines onto it with pencil. Doing it this way gives you a mirror image though, which you could trace again to get back to the original if you really wanted to.

 

 

So then after pinning the cotton down on some foam, I lightly sprayed with water and used acrylic paints mixed with clear hair gel as a medium. Yes, clear hair gel - or you can use Aloa sunburn gel. This makes the acrylic easier to work with and blend on the fabric.

 

Adding the ever so important little bit of white on the eyes.

 

I ironed alittle bit of fusible just around the edges, cut bubba out and found a background I liked. Back and batt, then quilted.

 

And quilted some more :-)

 

But really, how could you go wrong with a face like that!

 

A walk in the woods 9/5/13

A beautiful morning here in Vermont for a walk in the woods

 

Heading across the bridge to nowhere

 

I love how the morning light comes thru the trees

 

Lassie looking for Timmy

 

 

Come on Mom! Stop taking pictures so I can go home!

Quick! Take a picture of summer, she is actually still for this one second.

 

 

Looks like somebody found a mud bog :-)

 

 

 

We must have scared all the fairies away, their chairs are empty - better go home now :-)