Well….here is yesterday and today’s work….looks precious little, doesn’t it? Sigh….. Yesterday I “painted” the faces using Tsukinenko inks and prismacolor pencils and began the stitching. Today, I finished the hair. I think I will assemble each figure, hand applique the face part, and machine applique the rest (probably to the machine work first, then ease the face down using silk thread).

These two are destined to be Mary and Joseph:

These will be the shepherds:

The angel or two (?)

The magi:
The faces are different sizes…I’m hoping that it will appear that Mary and Joseph are in the foreground, that the magi are a little behind and to the right, and the shepherds a bit more distant yet on the left…. that’s what I’m hoping since I don’t want to re-do them all! We’ll see…..

And here’s the chaos of my sewing table after the fact…..you’ll notice quilts not put away etc. piled on the bed in the background……

At long last, I started the stitching! PHEW! Last week I sketched before I got too sick to do much of anything. This past weekend, I pinned up the background (dark sky, ground) and mountains (formerly a winter uniform skirt from San Domenico):

Then yesterday, I cut out the sketches and pinned them to the background:

Today, after some serious avoidance issues (the I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing -why-didn’t-I-just-do-simple-piecing-instead-of-trying-to-make-art kind of avoidance) I traced the faces onto white PFD (Prepared For Dyeing) fabric and began coloring them in. I intended to use Tsukinenko Inks to do the faces, but I just couldn’t get the detail I needed in the applicators–the faces are about 1 1/2 to 2 inches tall, so it’s mighty small geography to do a face…even with sharp pencils!

So I used a combination of Tsukinenkos and Prismacolor pencils. Since I have no idea how I’m really going to do this and am making it up as I go along, I cut some fusible interfacing to “back” (and add an opaque layer) each face, spray-basted the faces to some wash-away paper stabilizer, and stitched hair today. Am about halfway done…have the angel, Mary, one of the kings, and a spare angel–the faces that is. Tomorrow need to do the other two kings, Joseph and the shepherds. When done, I’ll take pics of a couple of the faces and upload…..think I’ll use Spray Fixative (the stuff folks use to “set” pastels) on the faces to help “set” the pencils. Sure hope I don’t ruin ’em!

Once the faces are done, I’ll start constructing the individual figures…..in the meantime, here’s a cropped part of one of Fra Angelico’s madonnas. I made my Virgin Mary and baby a composite of three different images, including this one. I LOVE the Madonna della Stella, holding that little baby—just like a newborn looks cuddled next to his mama, but like the face (and get a better view) from other images:

And here’s the basic sketch I’m using for my piece:

I’ve never done foiling before, but plan to do that for the halos, and add beads and sequins…why not go over the top?!! All I can do is fail miserably, succeed, or end up somewhere in between….the question is where (lost in the space inside my mind?????)……

WOW….coulda knocked me over with a feather. Of course, after this past week of feeling yucky, that was easy. But still……Joshua came in 4th….in a 6-state wrestling tournament for kids in grades 1 through 8!!!! The awards are done by age and weight. Joshua was in the 5th/6th group, and the 113 lb. weight class–there were something like 60 teams from 6 states, and something like 44 teams at his age/grade. WOW!

The two boys from our area who WON the Maine State championships came in, in their respective categories, 4th and 3rd! WOW…..what a showing for all of them, but I’m especially thrilled for Joshua–his season has been a “learning” season, so he’s been frustrated when he loses because the other kids know more moves, and when to use them. This medal has done wonders for his confidence, and that’s a good thing. And we’re grinning a lot around here!

Another cool thing…the local “wrestling club” (the coaches and boosters) ordered up t-shirts for this tournament with the names of the middle school kids who were scheduled to compete (alas, about 6 didn’t make it…some couldn’t get rides to Portland, 2 hours south of here, where the tournament was held). Joshua has not had the shirt off since receiving it on Saturday! Way to go Joshua (and guess what camp he wants to do this summer…yeah!)

My best friend, Marie J., is spearheading a project to make a Centennial Quilt to celebrate a double centennial celebration: both the San Juan County (Washington) courthouse (where she works) AND the County Fair (the absolute best country fair in the entire US of A) turn one hundred this year. She put out a call for one hundred blocks, to surround a central medallion. She’ll then assemble these blocks into a top which will be quilted by Orcas Island (part of San Juan County) long-arm quilter Keri Leighton Stone.

Even expatriates like me (we moved away from the island in summer ’04), are allowed to make blocks, so I finally got one done today. I hope to have another one done by Monday, and send them both off to Marie. Anyway, I used to enter all sorts of stuff in the fair….flowers, fruit, jams, baked goods, knitting, quilts, photographs….it was always so much fun to see who had made what (with 7000 year-round residents on San Juan Island, you knew a lot of folks, and more by name) in any given year. “Food Preservation,” for beer, wine, jams, jellies, preserves, pickles, pickled or canned meats and canned veggies and fruits was a favorite division, and I was able to help the official judges every year for about five years, so I elected to do a block with some of my jams:

The jar on the left reads “from Sarah Ann Smith’s ’04 kitchen: Skagit Valley Strawberry Jam,” and the one on the right is “Hannah Heights, S.J. Isl. Wild Blackberry Jelly, September 2003.” The blue ribbon is one I won for my strawberry jam the last year we lived there.

Every year the Catholic Church would send a flat-bed truck over to the fertile Skagit Valley, on the mainland, and come back with buckets of washed and hulled berries, sold as a fund-raiser. I’d buy 15-30 pounds every June and July and put up jams for the coming year. Then, in August the blackberries would ripen on cue with the local saying: when the blackberries are ripe, it’s time to go back to school. The berries are very seedy, so jams could be rather chewy; I decided to try jelly making for the first time, and oh heaven! The only thing better is fresh island blackberries plucked warm from the sun on an early autumn afternoon.

Now…..having given up on kleenex I’m taking my roll of TP to the sofa to hack and wheeze….

Got an e-mail from my friend Janet this morning saying “no new entries on your blog, so you must be sick.” She’s right. Joshua was down with a “stomach flu” (fortunately of the flat-on-your-back, achy gut variety, not the hugging-the-toilet variety) last week…I mean the un-stoppable kid was out for three days, plus the weekend. Hasn’t been that sick since pre-school germ-sharing. Which he did, with me, then Eli. On Saturday, I started feeling yucky. It is THURSDAY, and I still feel yucky, albeit less bad than yesterday. So not much doing…except…

Drum roll….the silver lining is that this week I’ve lost more weight than the past two months at Curves! If I can keep most of this week’s loss off after returning to normal eating, that’ll make a total of 20 pounds off since June 1, 2005! Yeah! I think maybe celebration, in the form of a hot fudge sundae (one scoop of French Vanilla or Coffee, or maybe a 50-50 scoop, with hot fudge no whipped cream, please) when the ice cream place opens for the season. And only another 10 pounds to go!

As for art…I was supposed to be working on Tableau. Have I babbled about that here? Well, I’ll have to check the archives, but anyway here’s a scan of the initial sketch for the nativity Tableau quilt (and yes, some of it is thin pencil so it won’t be all that easy to “divine”…pun definitely intended LOL):
This quilt will be for my old school, San Domenico School (thank heavens they dropped the “for Girls” when they admitted boys to the lower school, K-8; upper school, 9-12, is still all girls), and will celebrate the annual Christmas program, based on the paintings of Fra Angelico. More about it, the school and preliminary sketches in coming days. Since I want to have it finished in time to enter into Houston (which means done by May 15 or so) I’d REALLY better get to work! At least Monday and Tuesday, though I didn’t feel well, I was able to sit at the computer and sketch composite images. I’ll share some of those in coming days….