Well….here’s a question for you: Should you do “studies” before attempting a large piece? I have wanted to do a big quilt with a life-size pair of Ivory-Billed woodpeckers (who are some 20 inches long) and near life-sized tree-trunks. As part of a working arrangement with a yarn company, I thought I’d do a study in preparation. Now that I’ve done the study, well, I’ve lost some of the impetus to do the larger quilt. Here’s what I’ve done so far (and please, this is a work in progress and the tree trunk WILL change a bit!):

And here’s a detail which shows some of the dense quilting in the background:

Well…maybe if you click on it you can see the dense quilting in the background? There is a bird flying up near the top, and lots of tree trunks quilted into the background. Trust me!

The bird is done on black cloth with “eyelash” yarn for the feathers. I couched the feathers down to the black, then layered up the whole thing with Dissolve (water soluble stabilizer on top) and quilted the daylights out of him, to “tame” the eyelash yarn so he’s look feathered and not furry. I painted the cloth on the bill and crest (which got so dense I had to slice it so it will rest flat—when I finally applique him to the surface of the quilt I’ll fill in the gaps). The blob on the left is where his claw will be, but didn’t want to trim the cloth until I’m ready to stitch the claws…too much fraying nuisance otherwise.

The tree trunk (and the central background for that matter) are my hand-dyeds, then I couched a bunch of chenille yarns onto the trunk. I’m going to add some chopped up bits of yarn, then shreds and strips of brown tulle, then some cool “Halloween” black spiderwebbed tulle (which looks like the cracks and crenellations on bark when it is on top of the treetrunk) over that…trust me, it looks better.

Anyway, for the big quilt I had planned black borders (or nearly black), with writing on them. The big quilt is / was to be about 4 feet by 6 feet or so….a “very impressive” size. Well…here’s the problem. I’ve lost some (ok, a fair amount to most of) the urge to make the large quilt. It would have been a better quilt than this one, but who’s gonna buy such a big monster anyway? I still kinda want to make it, but……

As for this one, the edges are looking a bit pale. I LOVE the Bali Fabrics Batik in the borders, but may have to take it off and use something darker to balance the trunk and bird. Although binding might do the trick. What do you think? IF I were to switch to dark brown / nearly black, I could then do the original idea, too, but in smaller size……….. hmmm… Better sleep on it. And tomorrow is (oh joy of joys) driving 60 miles / 90 minutes to Bangor to get the car serviced and find out if that ominous sound near my right rear wheel, for the past 3 months, is going to be expensive to fix or not). More anon……

Wow…what an insane week! Haven’t even had a chance to post about my birthday last Tuesday, which was wonderful! In a nutshell, I went off the diet long enough to fix spaghetti (lots) for dinner (yummm…and no whining from the kids!) and have cheesecake for desert. Received a couple checks for my b-day, and had planned on a thread splurge. Then the printer died on Weds., so guess what…..I got a new printer for my b-day LOL! Sigh. Anyway, I DID order a catalog for the Matisse and textiles exhibit that is currently on at the Metropolitan in NYC before the printer died, so that will be here in a couple of weeks and should be great fun.

In the meantime, I’m slamming to finish a quilt for Lion Brand Yarns (more on that in the next post), then helped the art teacher at Camden-Rockport Middle School (CRMS) for two afternoons this week in a tie-dye workshop after school. As usual, it was mostly girls, but we got some great shirts out of it! We rinsed out today, so thought I’d post the results. Some of the shirts were tied quite tightly so there is a lot of white, but the girls like the results anyway…phew! I asked the girls to hold their shirts up to hide their faces to protect them on the internet, so that’s why the photos look like they do! Good job ladies and gentleman! (PS—for some reason a couple of the photos wouldn’t upload…sorry I couldn’t get them all on, ladies!)

Oh what a wonderful day! Monday, October 3rd, to be specific! It started with going to Curves at 7 am (shudder!) before getting on the road to Deb’s house for our monthly Frayed Edges get-together. The computer wished me happy birthday (#48 if anyone’s counting besides my mom), so a new friend–a quilter who just moved to Maine from Wisconsin–invited me to lunch! THEN, though I hadn’t mentioned it was my b-day on the 4th, Deb, Kate and Kathy surprised me with a wonderful birthday tart and gifts……how does one convey in letters that great, warm fuzzy feeling from having friends in a new place? I don’t know either so imagine it here: …………………

Lunch began with a wonderful potato soup by Deb (with fresh chopped spring onions and bacon bits, the real ones, to top it off), heavenly nutmeg muffins from Kath (I want that recipe!), and salad by me. Then Kate was the one responsible for providing the delectable tart….Here’s the tart :
Before blowing out the candles, I had everyone do the ring thing, which it seems many folks don’t know about, but that we did when I was growing up in California. If you take your rings off and place them over the candle, and everyone blows out the candles, everyone gets to wish! Of course, I think my wishes had already come true…friends and fabric and food….does it get any better? Well, the other three of the Frayed Edges came bearing gifts, too!
Kathy gave me this incredible brown paper–it’s that way cool thing under the plate and the two quiltlets– that looks like it was hand dyed, then embossed with this woven pattern…my first thought was sew it onto a quilt. My second thought was heck no…SCAN it, don’t cut into it, the print onto cloth and cut! It’s just incredible. The happy flower is from Kate, with some of her discharged green fabric (more in a sec), and the hilarious bird of beaded wing from Deb…the expression on his eye (which doesn’t quite show in the picture) is priceless! I’m not sure how I got so lucky to find these women, but I’m sure glad I did!

We also did cloth….Deb shared her wonderful news that she’ll be in Somerset in Spring, read about it on her blog! Kathy brought another awesome piece with her signature beads and style and colors and yarns, which she entered (hip hip hooray) into a great show…fingers toes and eyes are duly crossed on her behalf, though she’s so good she doesn’t need my help! And Kate is organizing a cool project for a fundraiser, and we played with her discharged and other fabrics and made the start of fabric postcards for her to use as inspiration and samples for the kids in the project:
Starting in the top left is Kate’s butterfly, then Kathy’s flowers on pink and blue (which she wanted to take home and add more stitchery and stuff, Deb’s buds on deep green, and my flowers, that turned out to be coneflowers and I don’t know what in the lower left. FUN! and fast, too.

I also shared some of my hand-dyed that I talked about a few days ago. Bottom line: some of it turned out way cool on second-dip, a some needs another round to get it where I want it to go. For most of these I used a combination of thinned navy, thinned safari gray (a yellowish gray) or a fairly light havana brown (a brown with a decided green cast). In the case of those fabrics needing “more”, I think the “thinned” dye was too thin….stay tuned. Anyway, this first photo is of two fabrics, nice colors, but totally plain and bland, and I had more than I needed of that color.

So, I put blue onto the one at left; while wet it looked like a muted eggplant, so I decided to let it be. To the insipid peach on the right I added gray and havana brown.

I like the one that used to be the peach (on the right)….it looks like stone, which is good for the “elements” pieces I’m going to work on this winter. The raspberry become plum is, well, kinda blech. Not a color I can imagine using, so it’s going to turn into a good earth on the next round of dyeing…..

And now I’m tired, and it’s getting late, and it’s my birthday, so I’m going to go have cheesecake with hubby, and a cup of hot tea and a good book. And I’ll tell you more about my current project tomorrow or the next day and maybe share more of the over-dyed (again) fabrics. It has been a wonderful two days, life is good, and I am blessed with friends and family. Maybe the very best thing today is my oldest son’s first words to me today as I went to kiss him awake, were Happy Birthday Mom, and those were his last words of the evening too. Love is a good thing.

The weather was already beginning to blow in over the back side of Mt. Battie and Mt. Megnticook when I went for a walk this morning. I loved the different visual texture and lines of the trees on the far side of the lake. Actually, this may technically be the Megunticook River…I think the lake proper is about a mile or two upstream, above where Molyneaux Street crosses at the narrows. But it’s a beautiful place to paddle, with fish and turtles and loons and kingfishers. Want to go for a final paddle once the leaves have turned and take pictures of the leaves reflected in the water from afloat…..