My favorite picture of the day…the boys warm up for the Class B (Maine) Eastern Regional Cross Country Championship… notice the muddy handprint? This was BEFORE the race…. competitors were, by the end, covered head to toe in mud!

Or make that RACE!  Today was an incredibly sodden day for the Maine High School Eastern Regional Cross Country Championships, held at Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast, Maine.  It might just as well have been called Mudfest 2012!  When driving home from dropping Eli off at the bus this morning, it was raining so hard that even though I had my wiper on “whip”, I could barely see.  The road surface was not visible…the rain was coming down so hard it was bouncing up and the top of the road was a gray haze.  That meant MUD!  But the kids were AMAZING!  The Girls Team WON Class B Eastern Regionals and for the first time in memory the Boys Team qualified for States!  The top 8 of 15 teams get in, and the boys placed 6th!  Awesome job!

After the meet, a VERY happy Camden Hills Regional High School (Maine) Cross Country team!

From the boys team, Junior Ben Trapani put in an amazing run coming in second in Class B!  Eli Smith and best friend since first grade Ben Winchenbach both turned in amazing times–if the boys team had not qualified as a team, they each would have qualified for States by placing in the top 30:  Eli was 19th and Ben 26th!!!! As FRESHMEN?!!!!!!   The rest of the boys also exceeded their previous bests for a combined performance that earned the entire team a trip to the State Championships for the first time in memory…. at least 7 or more years since a Camden Boys team has qualified.  WELL DONE, gentlemen!

The Girls Team has been a local powerhouse for quite some time, and thrillingly, they won with Brittany Bowman coming in third in the Class B girls, and with three of the girls in the top ten, six in the top thirty.  That’s why they won!

Looking across the field to the starting line for the boys’ race

And they’re off…. Ben Trapani is just to the left of Eli (who has a red arrow pointing at him…yes, Mama is proud!)

A little blurry photo, but that is Eli running in the red, about halfway through the race at 20th! We knew he needed to make 30th or better if the team didn’t make the cut–which it hadn’t in years! Paul and I were dumbfounded that he was so far up in the pack! THEN, Ben W. comes along seven runners later!!!! He could make it too!

Eli is nothing if not determined. Here you see the boys coming down the hill into the straightaway into the chute (and BIG HUGE puddles)…Maybe 200 yards to go?

Then Eli gets this look of determination on his face and you know you are about to witness his “final kick”…. here the legs and arms start churning, puddle or no! Notice how he has closed the gap from the previous photo.

And into overdrive…this is what makes Eli a winner! Not just physical ability, but mental fitness and determination and drive! (Yeah… I’m totally, deliriously biased!) We did not know it at the time, but just before the last uphill, he twisted an ankle a little bit and fell behind the kid to his left in this photo.  Without the slip, he might even have overtaken the boy in dark blue.  As it was, he finished 19th!  as a FRESHMAN!

After the race…can you say MUDDY? This is before Eli went for his chest-slide. The mud was so slick in places you could have put a sled on it and gone downhill!

L to R: Forest P., Ben W., Ben T. and Eli…well done!

And now, the GIRLS are off! I didn’t get many photos of the girls…somehow I wasn’t “on” with the camera today and many of my photos were blurry.

In the stands…notice the change in color in Eli’s shirt? This one is AFTER sliding on his chest in the mud!

The Girls Class B Eastern Regional Champions! WOOT!!!! Well done to one and all!

And lest you think I forgot about quilting, nope. Wondering: would this photo of the mud turn into a good Thermofax screen?

And last and best, teenagers being teenagers!

Having fun at the end of the day…great job to everyone!

And I am happy to report, as soon as Eli got home he went out to the hose, in the rain, to hose down his running spikes, then came in and peeled off all the grimy muddy muck into the washing machine and himself into the shower.  What a wonderful day!   And yes, I am REALLY GLAD I wore my Bogs boots…rubber up past the ankles!

Edelbert (detail). Full photo below. (c) SarahAnnSmith.com

What a concept… I actually made a small quilt!  And of course prepped more new samples for demos in my classes, starting with Quilt Festival in Houston this fall, so thought I’d share with you.  I’m in a small online fabric postcard swap group, Postmark’d Art.  One of the themes I signed up to do this round was Birds.  Of course I was stumped…way too many choices!  At first I was going to do birds from the trip to Florida.  Then our local wild turkeys.  Then I hit on it:  the saw-whet owl!  There was this adorable ad in the Nature Conservancy magazine with an owl in a little straw hat.  Presto!

Owls ready to wing their way to their new homes with members of Postmark’d Art.  (c) SarahAnnSmith.com

Then I wanted to donate one of these cards to Pokey Bolton’s fundraising effort to benefit the Houston area animal shelters… she’s only lived in Houton since the start of this year and has already rescued three critters (permanently adopting one of them).  She had a great idea to sell fabric postcards at Festival for $20 each, all proceeds to go to the local shelters.  So of course I wanted to help… she’s even (what a thrill!) included both of my cards on her blogposts including here.  Read more about it and see some of the fun cards that have arrived here.  I hope I’m not so buy in class that I miss the chance to swing by the postcard zone when Festival opens!  But my cards were too close to the ad, so I wanted to change it up a bit.  Since I live in Maine, what else would do but an Elmer Fudd hat??? Here are my two donations:

Donated to the Pet Postcard / Animal Shelter Fundraiser…visit Pokey Bolton’s blog for more information!

HE was so cute, I had to make a small quilt.  My local quilt chapter, the Coastal Quilters, is part of Maine’s Pine Tree Quilt Guild.  As part of our 2013 challenge, we are making somewhere between one and nine 13×13 inch square quilts using one of nine themes announced between fall of 2011 and April 2013.  We’ll display our challenge quilts at the 2013 Maine Quilts Show.  Well, I am SERIOUSLY behind.  I did the first one, then got sidetracked by life.  So, here is my “Eyes” challenge quilt, because after all what are owls all about if n ot their eyes?

Edelbert in a bit of a snowy wind

I LOVE this guy!  His name is Edelbert.  You can call him Eddie or Bert, but I think we prefer Bert.  Clearly he has a sense of humor and is a fun soul to have around.  I’ll share the class samples once I’ve debuted them in Houston…stay tuned!  Think white eggs on white background!

Utterly not related to either art or quilting, but a big event for us nonetheless:  construction on the garage has begun!   Now when we dig out in winter, it will be to dig out the garage doors and not the car itself!

In the beginning there was open space where we parked. The first step is to trench in the electrical.

Next, our neighbor Alex, who is the plow guy, the Hope town Road Commissioner, Deputy Fire Chief and probably a few other hats, too, prepared the pad/area for the concrete guys to come in:

Alex seems to have a small fortune in large earth moving equipment! He’s brought in dirt to pound and level before the cement men arrive to pour the slab.

Then come the men to pour the slab.

The forms are ready and the cement truck has arrived.

The pour begins!

Then

At the beginning of October, the builders arrived and started setting up. First there was a slab and a saw.

Next

The framing goes up!

And as of Friday the 12th,

The plywood starts to go on. We will have three garage bays: two for cars, one for the tractor mower and other assorted Stuff. To the right the roof will overhang the last six feet of slab. This will be for storing wood. Each late spring/early summer we get a delivery of logs which a local young man cuts and splits for firewood. We season it outside for a year, then the following summer it comes indoors to the wood storage area in the basement to use in the woodstove which provides our winter heat. Now, that wood will season and store under a roof instead of under the pine trees or a tarp.

I’ll keep you posted as the building continues.

Halloween Refreshments at Coastal Quilters yesterday, Oct. 13

Yesterday was glorious and crisp, this morning is gray, misty and dreary… a perfect day for catching up on blogging, reading, quilting, eating.  Well… I guess I don’t need to catch up on eating but I like the idea anyway!  It’s potato and turkey kielbasa soup in the slow cooker today.   Anyway, when I went to get in the car yesterday morning to head to quilting, there was the first frost on the window!

First frosty windshield of the season…time to turn on the defroster and the seat warmer!

It was a lovely meeting with a great speaker, Mim Bird, owner of the new Over the Rainbow Yarns in Rockland (here…GREAT shop!), great friends, and it was Kathy’s and my turn to do refreshments.  I don’t know what got into me.  I don’t do much holiday decoration other than Christmas, and never do much for Halloween.  Must’ve been possessed by the spirits over on Pinterest or suffering from a need to create…. Kathy fixed the food that tasted good!  I fixed stuff I could play with…yes, I played with my food, and boy did I have fun!  That’s the whole table at the start of the blogpost.

Thanks to Ashley, older son’s girlfriend, for the lovely mums for my birthday that I shared (and promptly returned to our porch).  And we have some bittersweet in the yard, and this piece had already broken off….    and Kath brought great Halloween cups and napkins and made her own caramel popcorn…YUM!  I made brownie graves, Frankensteins and meringue ghosts….

Brownies, tombstones, ghosts, Kathy’s caramel popcorn, and  in there somewhere a Frankenstein (KitKat or other chocolate-coated wafer cookie with frosting to make the head)–see if you can spot him leaning somewhat drunkenly against one of the tombstones

Meringue ghosts were surprisingly easy to make. Mine were a bit short and fat… I guess I’m going to have to break down and buy a pastry cone/funnel/tube thingy…whatever that thing is called that you use to pipe frosting! With a wide tip it would have been easier to make taller ghosts than my squat with-a-spoon fellows

Copper tendrils hold the watch face onto my sketchbook cover.

Oh what FUN!  For a number of years now I have been inspired by New Zealander Claire Prebble’s wirework in her art-to-wear costumes (her website is here), and have wanted to mess around with wire.  Then last summer I took the first of three online classes with Jane LaFazio.  In one of them, I “met” Janice Berkebile and several other wonderful women.  After the second of the classes with Jane, we decided to set up our own sketching group online (we are globally dispersed from the San Francisco Bay area to northern California to near Seattle, Ontario Canada, Vermont and Maine and in the UK).  One day, Janice quietly said “Oh… my first book is just published.”  SAY WHAT?!!!!!!!   Here it is, and it is wonderful:

Available at Amazon.com

If you’d like to see Janice, click here and for the home page to their website, click here.

Well, I’m nowhere near starting on anything as awesomely intricate as Claire Prebble’s work, or even one of the simpler projects in the book, but I sure had a grand start today.  See several years ago, my Frayed Edges art quilt mini-group friends and I decided to do a journal-cover swap.   I got the lovely one made by Kate Cutko (queen of recycled and all things “green”…her blog is here) which has discharged and also rust-dyed fabric.  When she gave it to me, she told me she had wanted to find a watch face to sew to the cover.  Well, that year at Quilt Festival/Houston I found just the one!

After several years of use, the monofilament thread which I had used to attach the watch face had  broken, so I wanted to re-apply the watch face to the journal more securely.  At first I was going to sew beads to set it the way you would use seed beads to couch a cabochon (big flat stone/bead) to something.  Ugh. Hard.  Then I had a brainstorm–WIRE!   So this morning I started to play.

My work table this morning with hammers, pliers, cutters, wire (copper), more wire, and Janice’s book open to the appropriate page.

At first I was thinking of making a network of wire underneath with curlicues that extended to the front and intertwined with a circle of copper (since I bought that because it isn’t as expensive as silver!) on the top.  Then I thought…why a second circle on top?  How about “prongs” that wrap to the front and have them hold it?   SO….I made it!

Janice and Tracy’s book is great because it tells you what tools you need, which are nice-but-optional (especially when starting the cost of tools can be a bit frightening!).  I bought a larger bench block than you recommended (only slightly) in the book because I want  to eventually work on some larger pieces that may well include shapes cut from sheet metal…. They give all sorts of hints and tips, and have TONS of step-by-step pictures so you can follow along on your own.

Journal, with watch face attached with way more fun and creativity this time!

The tendrils that wrap to the front grip the watch face securely.  I sewed the copper “whatchamacallit” to the cover, then tucked the watch face into it, and pinched the tendrils down.

And then for fun I tried to make a spiral…while standing up and rushing.  Not the best, but at least it is a start!

Not quite round, but at least it is a tight spiral with a hanging loop!

So now I have their book back by my spot on the sofa and tonight will pore over it to see what I can adapt to use some beautiful beads made by ANOTHER internet friend that I got to meet in the real 4 years ago in Paducah (Caty are you out there?)!