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…..

Yesterday I dyed and over-dyed some fabric. I knew I needed more greens and browns for an upcoming project, but didn’t have much white PFD (prepared for dyeing) fabric. Then I realized I could over-dye some of the ugly, ugly, ugly fabric from some of my first attempts. After all, I wanted swamp green and mud….and the moosh of all colors makes mud, so how could I lose?

My favorite piece is the ochre “rock” which started out as a nearly-solid peachy tan:

OK….Blogger is working again! Yeah! That means I can now upload photos again. The other one that turned out way cool (I think anyway) is one that I’ll use for the background / sky in the swamp area (so am I the only one that was surprised to learn that yellow plus black make olive green?)….

Anyway, it’s also possible to salvage the uglies. Here is what I began with (this piece, by the way, is on the back of my African guy–Bijagos Warrior–didn’t think to take pictures before I overdyed…anyway, you can see how UGLY this is!).

Here’s what it looked like after adding more dye (yellows and burnt oranges):

Still not exactly beautiful, but WAY more useable. It doesn’t show in this picture, but there are really cool crystally markings, and a soft green hue that will work for leaf canopy, to give some contrast and definition to the leaves. There were some over-dyed pieces that began as blue, ended up being a bit too brilliant green after adding both lemon and warm yellows. So, they went back into the dye-pots today…used thinned navy and “safari” gray, a gray with a yellowish cast. And the tree bark turned out too reddish-orange (I want swamp, not redwood), so added some greeny-brown and blue, and we’ll see how it looks tomorrow.

Well, I can honestly say I had fun, and I’m glad I’m done for now! Today I made another 13 postcards. Two are large–6×8, the rest are typical 4×6 postcards, and all are –uncharacteristically– abstract. I used a piece of fabric I painted…a fat quarter (21×18 inches), then quilted the daylights out of it, cut it into pieces, and finished the edges. Most of these will be donated to either Virginia Spiegel’s Cancer Research fundraiser at Festival in Houston or the www.artdoinggood.com fundraiser for the Red Cross hurricane relief efforts. Here are a bunch of photos:
The first is the wholecloth painted fabric, which became all of the cards. I’ve called this the Canyon Colors Series, numbered 1 – 13.

And more: