Last minute preparations for going to Houston included packets to give to the major distributors (the folks from whom Quilt shops buy their patterns, notions, books and whatnot) with my line of patterns and letting them know about my book, ThreadWork Unraveled.  Of course, none of the regular envelopes was the correct size..too large, too small, none just right.

So I decided to think like my friend Deborah, who is amazing at putting together lovely package presentations.  I decided to use cloth ties or tags or something…and went looking for white envelopes, not boring manila.  I wanted my package to stand out. Then I measured and sewed up the tyvek envelopes so the contents wouldn’t slop around, punched holes to add the tag which has a custom “Sarah by the Sea” stamp on one side and a hand-written “thank you” on the other side, and tied things up!

So far, EE Schenck (out in Oregon) gets the prize for the most prompt reply (alas a thanks but no thanks).  Will have to follow up with the others.

And, inspired by Margarete Steinhauer’s jewelry bag in the current 2009-2010 Quilting Arts Gifts magazine, I decided to make my own.  Margarete’s cinches up into a little snug ball.   Of course, my suitcases are always crammed, and I am so intensely visual I want my jewelry case to open up flat.  So I made this:

Here it is open:

I used an idea from Diane Rusin Doran (who had two awesome projects in the same issue, won a third place in the same category as I did in Houston, and is just cool and fun!), to wit:  paint white velcro so it matches your project—reject the tyranny of white-black-beige!  Diane suggested using a thin, ink-consistency paint.  I didn’t have any so I thinned some leaf green Setacolor.  Kinda blotchy, so while in Houston I bought some Jacquard Ink! From Jane Davila’s Flourish booth to try next; you can find these items at her website store, here (if you don’t find it on the website…e-mail her….they have it and you can order it for sure!).

This project is definitely a prototype…the long zipper (which I had on hand) allows the bag to open flat but is a nuisance in real life, so I’ve got an idea for an improvement.  Then maybe I’ll submit it to Quilting Arts Gifts for next year’s issue and see if I can finally get a pattern in it!

Back next with pictures from the show floor and my classes!

Sheesh…ya think my life has been on fast forward?  Just checked and I have photos for blogposts from July and August….. posts I never had time to write!  So before I get to Houston and Festival and the Frayed Edges in October, I’ll share the summer fun!

We were a small group in August.  Deborah, of course, was in the beastly heat of Texas, and Hannah was home with four girls, so she didn’t make it to our August get-together.  But Kate, Kathy and I finally had our “dyeing day” which we had originally planned for last summer (!).  AND we got to celebrate Kathy’s birthday (photo above).

Then we got to the fun, messy stuff!  I set up tables in the back yard, and mostly forgot to take pictures, but thankfully Eli took a few, especially the following day when I had more time to putter. He got one of me on the “mixing table.”

(Marie…don’t those rasty clothes I’m wearing look familiar?  Marie and I used to dye in our garage in Friday Harbor before I left Wash. for Maine!)

Here is one of the mottled pieces I did.  On the right you can see the edge of the trampoline, which (covered with plastic) held our dyed wonders!

Here’s the same piece, dry:

I wanted to try a bit of shibori, cloth that is tied to create resists.  I used those glass “pebbles” that you can buy to  put in the bottom of vases or for mosaics and crafts, and tied them with yarn.  It took nearly 3 hours after Kate and Kathy left to tie up a yard of fabric.

I  deliberately didn’t tie some of the pebbles too tight, as I am not fond of white fabric showing on my dyed fabrics.  I wanted just a bit of dye to seep under the ties so the resist would show, but not too much.  Here is the cloth batching in a plastic tub:

And looking at the bottom of the tub:

Finally, it was done, and I LOVE it!

I even ended up using it as the backdrop for a photo in my book (to order, click on the link in the left sidebar, and yes, I ship outside the US)!

Here are the socks and shirt I did the day after the Frayeds….  the purple socks went to Deborah, since she couldn’t be with us.  You can see them on here feet here Teeheee!  The pink and yellow socks were for Hannah for her birthday in late September, and the upside-down rainbows and shirt are for me!

And here is the rest of my dyeing days results.  I find that for my art quilts, I prefer “blendy” fabrics, not hand-dyeds with sharp crystallization patterns–at least for most things.  You’ll find that many of my fabrics from this session are blendy and “stash fillers” to plug gaps in my selection.  without further commentary:

Hope you enjoyed…I sure did!  Now to find time to quilt with it!

At LONG Long last, the cases of books have arrived and I will begin shipping pre-orders, with the first orders being shipped first.  All items will be sent via US Postal Service (USPS) Priority Rate Flat Mail envelopes, both domestic and International–the equivalent first class mail.  Since this service is eminently reliable in the US, I won’t contact each of you individually; please DO let me know if there is a problem!   For international orders, the USPS tracking ends when the package leaves the US, so I will send each person living outside the US an e-mail to let them know the package is en route.  I hear that these envelopes take 1-2 weeks to be delivered to Canada, but not sure about Australia.  Someone let me know?  THANKS!

Towards the end of the editing process for ThreadWork Unraveled, my editor said “OK Sarah:  we have two empty pages and three things we could use:  the Index, Resources and the Annotated Bibliography.  Which would you like in the book?”  I chose the Index instantly, since any good reference book MUST have one.  The resources list was shorter, and I really wanted to keep the full bibliography intact.  So I suggested that we add a note at the start of the Resources page that if folks wanted, they could visit here (my blog) to download a FREE annotated bibliography:  From Sarah’s Bookshelf .

The categories include:

• Art Quilting
• Breaking Out and Stretching Yourself
• Color
• Decorative Stitch and Free-motion Embroidery
• Drawing, Design Inspiration and Creativity
• Hawaiian Applique
• Machine Applique
• Machine Quilting and Design
• Miscellaneous Cool Stuff
• Painting and Dyeing Fabric

You can click on the link to download the entire PDF, but when you print it (it is 14 pages long), you can select just one section to print if you only want, for example, Painting and Dyeing Fabric books.  Also, if I decide to update a section (I’ll probably be adding Melanie Testa’s Inspired to Quilt book soon to the latter category), you only need to check to see if a section has been updated and re-print that one, not the whole thing.

If you have any favorite books that aren’t on my list, DO share the information by leaving a comment.  I LOVE books (can’t you tell?).

And mother nature has a wicked sense of humor….more on that in a minute…

Keeping Watch Over Carlson Ranch by David Taylor of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Yes, this photo is a tease of more to come, and I'm posting it especially for my friend Jacquie (the quiltmuse whose poem on thread graces the Dedication page of my book) who loves owls.

Yes, I am home from Houston, happy, content, hugged, doggie-slurped-and-wiggled, kitty-go-bumped, tired, and did I say happy?   The trip to Quilt Market and Festival went wonderfully well.  As expected it was both exhilarating and exhausting, but of course re-entry requires you to unpack, do laundry, pay bills, walk the dog, feed the kids, crash on the sofa with hubby and all those good things.

The Forest of Trees (from quilters in Germany) was one of the coolest exhibits I've seen at Festival. It made people smile... more on this in another blogpost.

To GET to those good things, I had to get home. Remember Mother Nature?  She didn’t just rain on my parade, she SNOWED on it.  On October 18th for heaven’s sake!

My suitcase weighed 66 pounds (16 over the limit) when I got to the airport in Houston, so I moved stuff to my carry on bags (thereby making them stuffed to beyond bearing).  That meant my two carry-ons were 33 and 34 pounds each.  The top bag was the heavier, with laptop, video cam and projector and a thousand cables for classes… I have the new bag that zips open so you don’t have to take out the laptop, but with all the cables etc. the TSA that did secondary review on the way down told me it would be faster if I unpacked the projector and cables ahead of time…they were right but what a fuss.

SO…. I had three flights:  Houston to LaGuardia in New York City, NYC to Boston, then the final hop on the 8-seater plane from Boston to Rockland, Maine, a one-hour flight.  Thanks to being in old airports in NYC and Boston, I had to go through security THREE TIMES because of airline/terminal changes.  UGH.  And in NYC the guy said the carry-on was too big, wouldn’t let me through.  I zipped the overstuffed daypack off the suitcase and strapped it to the computer bag, and he let me through.  I thanked him for being flexible and told him good karma would come to him.

When I got to Boston, weather was bad and had been all day.  Cape Air is a wonderful little regional airline (very nice, helpful, generous compared to the big airlines), but the planes are small.  And there were high winds.  Winds too high for the little planes.  All flights to Nantucket and Martha’s Vinyard had been stalled all day.  I waited 3 hours for my flight time to arrive.  As the time approached my flight went from on time, to delayed, to (an hour after scheduled lift-off) cancelled.  Fortunately, I was already setting up alternatives, and had called the Knox County (local to home) airport to get the name of the car rental company there so I could rent a car and drive home, then drop it off near where MY car was parked—Knox County Airport told me 15 minutes before Boston did that the flight was cancelled.

So after getting up at 3:45 a.m. (I woke early….usually sleep fitfully before a travel day), to the airport in Houston by 5:15 a.m., at 7:15 p.m. I was at the Budget rental counter getting a car to drive home 190 miles (4 1/2 to 5 hours due to the second half not being the interstate) in snow, sleet, rain, dark, cold and tired.   BLEAH.   But as I moved north the nastiest of the weather abated and turned to rain, and at 10 pm NPR had on a Canadian Broadcasting concert the first hour of which was Arlo Guthrie!  LOVED it…was singing away in the dark in my tinny little compact!  Got home at 12:15.  Paul had stayed up waiting (and worrying I think, the weather really was nasty) and the dog almost wiggled off his hind-quarters!  Kissed the boys (who were asleep), and we dropped into near instant sleep.

In a few days I’ll start sharing all the good stuff from Houston, with LOTS of pictures!