One of the members on one of my e-lists is going through a rough year, recently diagnosed with not one but TWO serious illnesses at the same time. So, another group member is going to put together a snuggly quilt for her, and I made this block. The stitching around it reads: fabric, friends, health, hugs, thread, these things I wish for you, fabric, friends, health, hugs:

Then I FINALLY, after five months, got the squares cut from my BlauViolett dyed cottons and silks so I can do some tests for lightfastness (as in, will it fade a lot or not?) for this dye, procion MX-RX-7 known as BlauViolett. You may (dimly, in your distant memory) recall reading this blogpost about my December dyeing adventures. Well, I didn’t want glue to be a factor in any lightfastness testing, so I cut sorta-square pieces about 3 1/2 inches on a side and stitched them to some stabilizer (a sewing product used to prevent fabric from behaving badly when doing dense stitchery). Here is what the fabrics looked like in December up on my work table:

Here are the stitched up groups. There is a VERY wiggly sheer silk at the top, followed by the cotton (the dye is reputed to be very unstable on cotton exposed to light), silk dupioni, a silk jacquard (with a mystery fiber that is clearly neither silk nor cellulose fiber as it stayed white), and the delectable, want to roll naked in it wear it next to my body sandwashed silk . One source has told me that on silk, the dye is stable and retains its GLORIOUS color, but that on cotton it fades horribly. The two vertical strips on the left are going into the dark. The far left one is inside a manila envelope inside a cupboard, the short strip is on top of the envelope in the cupboard (which is opened fairly regularly but not subject to intense light exposure).

The other four strips are dated with the date they went up on the window. I will, I hope

remember to take them down at one-month intervals. This window faces east-southeast, and gets some of the best sunlight / exposure in our house. We don’t have any windows without the sashings, so this is the best testing spot I can find (the only other option would be pinned to the screen on the back porch, subject to the elements…nah!). At the end of summer we’ll compare the six strips side by side!

I actually had a little time to play in the studio and tidy up. I had not planned to participate in the Coastal Quilters challenge, which I blogged about a few days ago here. But……about a week before the 10 by 10 inch quiltlets were due I thought, hey…. I could actually pull this off, I have a week. I knew what I wanted to do with the photo… of ropes and buoys… how I wanted to zoom in. And I knew I wanted to do a color study changing the colors from yellow-red buoys and multicolored ropes to something else, but couldn’t decide if I wanted to do all blues, or go wild and use pink and coral and purple. So I decided to do both! I didn’t have the facings finished in time, but since I volunteered to do the paperwork and prep stuff for hanging them in Maine Quilts in late July, I was OK.

Here’s how I did it. First, I took the photo (by CQ member Jan’s husband Dwight… you can see their website here) and fiddled around with various cropped versions until I had a composition I liked. Then I enlarged it on the computer and taped tracing paper to the screen, and traced lightly with pencil. I needed to reposition the paper and photo a couple of times since my screen isn’t 10 inches tall to get the drawing / tracing in the photo at the start of this post.

Then I picked fabrics. I kept the values the same–the background is the darkest area, the center of the tops of the buoys is the lightest (except for the white thing at the top… can you tell I’m a transplant to Maine… I don’t know what the parts are called…blushing, blushing, hanging head in embarrassment!). I was thinking teal, but the true blues picked themselves. Then I wanted to go way crazy and use a printed batik for the tops, which led to the purple-pink version! I used Saral or Transdoodle transfer paper between the traced design and the fabric to transfer the markings (like using dressmakers paper to mark darts) and cut out the pieces of pre-fused fabrics.

Finally, after fusing up the compositions, I selected at least six threads per piece and quilted the living daylights out of them! FUN! Last step, a facing since I wanted a clean “no edge” look for these pieces. When they return from being part of the group challenge, I’ll mount them on stretcher bars covered with cotton like I did the crane or white flower:

A few days ago, I couldn’t help myself…. it was too glorious not to just take pictures of the colors. When there are scarcely any bare branches left, when you start sneezing, and maple trees leave drifts of green fluff on the ground, spring has arrived in all its glory in Maine! When the tips of the forsythia start to go green, you know summer will be here in a month…

Even the parking lot by the police/fire station is glorious, with this tree in bloom:

Just LOOK at this!

That sky! Now that is SCREAMING BLUE!

Even the pavement is beautiful… look at the silhouettes of the budding leaves….

and the dandelions…. did you know the word comes from the French “Dents de leons” meaning (literally) “teeth of the lions”?

Spring is HERE!

It was a lovely Sunday! I got to sleep in late, then we had waffles. I love making a special breakfast on Sundays, so this time I got to pick the “what.” So I picked waffles (which tho it takes time since I make them from scratch, everyone likes so there is no grumping from the boys…well, Paul doesn’t like them but he doesn’t like anything before about 11 am so we’re not going there…). And I decided to try making them buttermilk blueberry waffles…. YUM! With butter, real maple syrup or the raspberry syrup the boys love… what a wonderful way to start the day!

Paul had a lovely bouquet of flowers for me, Joshua had trotted to town on Saturday with a donation from Paul’s wallet and a grin and returned with a bag, and Eli had a project he’d worked on for school (above). We went to see Mom and give her a nice plant, and she gave me a nice check (which is going into my iPod stereo dock stash), and then we had her over for supper, too. It was a lovely, quiet, at-home day… spring has sprung in Maine, and we loved it!

Eli’s class has been working on embroidery projects with a local fiber artist (how cool is that?). When in for his parent-teacher conference I browsed through the projects admiring several, one of which–unbeknownst to me–was Eli’s birch trees! Now THAT’s COOL!

Then, Joshua knows I love stuffed animals, so he bought me an orca since we used to see and hear them from our old house in Friday Harbor. He also loves guitar, and wants one with a Floyd Rose, which is a doo-hickie so that when one uses a whammy bar (this thing that makes a sort of sound distortion) the guitar doesn’t go out of tune. So, said orca’s name is Floyd Rose. That’s him in the photo above, on some fabrics I pulled to make a Journal quilt to enter in this eyar’s exhibit…. Floyd and my birch trees are up in my studio… I have, alas, VERY little vertical wall space tho lots of sloping ceiling. So, I’m looking for a good spot for the trees, and think I have them… stay tuned!

Inspired by my mini-group’s 5 x 5 challenge, which I blogged about here and in the photo above (right click to see it larger), my local quilt guild chapter decided to do a small art quilt challenge which will be displayed at Maine Quilts at the end of July! WOWIE zowie! To keep a little bit of the surprise, I won’t share Dwight P’s photo (used with his permission) on which the quilts were based–tho I will say it was of ropes and buoys.

I will share some of the results….for a group that hasn’t ventured much into art quilting for many of them, I thought this was 100 percent awesome! And the left side of the table:

Jan P., married to the photographer, played with the photo in her computer software, then created the cloth! Everything you see in Jan’s photo began as white.

Barb Melchiskey is an expert applique-er , and it appears she has a good eye for abstracting elements, too!

Mathea Daunheimer, if you can believe it, has only been quilting about two years (and already has a quilt juried in to the Tactile Architecture exhibit in Houston… YEAH MATHEA!), but has clearly done lots of things artistic. She used Tsukinenko inks to draw/paint her piece:

I’ll share my two pieces…two colorways of the sames cropped view of the photo with you in a later post, including HOW I did the “drawing.” Wish I had taken more close ups! Hope you can come to Augusta at the end of July for our show. Here’s a link to the Pine Tree Quilt Guild / Maine Quilts website.