My friend Jacquie in VT sent me these…she loves words as much as I do. I DARE you to try to read through this list without laughing out loud.

NEW WORDS FOR 2007 :

Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and elsewhere)!!!

1. BLAMESTORMING
Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

2.SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

3.ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard .

4.SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

5. CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles.

6.PRAIRIE DOGGING : When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

7. MOUSE POTATO : The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

8.SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

9.STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

10.SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

11.XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.

12.IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are Annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.

13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

14. ADMINISPHERE : The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

15. 404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.

16. GENERICA : Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

17.OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake).

18.WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.

19. CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.

Cheers from Sarah (the occasional 404 and Mouse Potato) the SITCOM in a land of WOOFs

The NEW CLASS SCHEDULE is ready! In the coming months I’ll be teaching machine quilting, and designing the perfect quilting pattern (for hand and machine quilters). If you would like me to teach a class to a group, drop me a line and I’d love to set something up–just reply to this posting and I’ll get in touch.

I am expanding a newsletter for loyal visitors to this site and my blog. I’ve included newsy bits and class listings in the past, but hope to add a handy tip or a book review in future “issues.” If you’d like to be added to my list (I promise I won’t share e-mail addresses!), please click on this link to send me your info.

To register for a class, contact the store where it is held directly. Maine-ly Sewing in Nobleboro (along Route 1) is at 207-563-8445. Cote Brothers in Auburn (just off the interstate) is at 782-5922:

2007:
February 17 (Saturday)–Quilting Design at Cote Brothers, Auburn
February 28 (Wednesday)–With a Dash of Color: a trunk show and lecture for the Island Quilters of Southwest Harbor (Mt. Desert Island) and Ellsworth quilters
March 4 (Sunday)–Machine Quilting, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro
October–lecture and workshop, Amoskeag Quilters, Candia, NH

I’ll be contacting both stores plus one other about scheduling for April through May this coming week, and will post here as soon as I have dates set.

In August 2007, our mini-group The Frayed Edges will be having a show at the Camden (Maine) Public Library. It has a gorgeous building and setting overlooking Camden Harbor, and we are thrilled. We have settled on three things:

–we will have a theme that will cover part of the exhibit: Home
–we’ll do a challenge (more on that in a sec)
–and the rest will be in keeping with our no-stress motto, using whatever we have that we’d like to exhibit for the rest of the show

For the challenge, we decided we’d each do a small piece based on a photo each of us provided. That means there will be 25 small pieces, which we’ll hang in a grid. Going across each row you’ll see one artist’s work, with each column being the same image, interpreted five ways. Because of the chair rail and needing to keep the top row low enough to see, we ended up with some pretty small sizes: 7 inches tall! The two vertical pieces will be 7 inches tall by 5 inches wide, and the horizontals will be 7 inches tall by 10 inches wide.

Kathy, of Studio in the Woods blog, took this photo—what glorious color! I had NO idea what to do, so decided to challenge myself to do something abstract. Hmmm. Here’s how I started… the photo is on the left, and my “start” is a fused applique of the umbrella against the glorious sky (please tip head sideways)

Then I cut it up.

Then I fused it. Then I quilted it.

Hmmm…… maybe I should stick to representational?

I really like the representational (but simplified) version of what I did with the photo from Deborah. Her husband Jeff took this photo at a hotel when on a trip, to Guatemala I think. I LOVE the contrast of the vibrant (vibrating?) orange-red w/ith the greens and stone and pool blue. Obviously, it isn’t quilted yet, and that will add detail (like the legs on the loungers by the pool!), but so far I love this one…as much as the original photo.

Of course, I tried representational with this glorious photo Hannah shared, with permission form a friend (and if this looks familiar, it’s because I blogged about it a while back). Here’s the photo:

And here’s my not-so-great rendition.

I think I’m going to start over…just don’t like this one much as is. Instead of going even more macro, maybe I’ll pull back and add some background and environment?

There are two more photos that I haven’t begun translating into cloth…Kate’s of St. Michael’s cathedral in Kiev and mine of some amphorae (ancient Mediterranean jugs) at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, which are at the top of this blogpost.

I promise I’ll return with what I do with those two, and in August, I’ll post pics of the challenge AND of the show!

This past weekend I taught my postcard class for a second time, this time at Cote Brothers in Auburn, and boy was it FUN! The students this time were really ready to branch out, even though some of them had never done anything remotely art quilty…boy did they succeed! It was especially fun because several of the ladies were returning students—that always makes me feel wonderful, because it means I’ve managed to teach them something well enough that they want to come back for more…HOORAY! and thank you. (Left to right are Sharon, Sue, Victoria and Rachel. Pam was over at the register I think, and Dawna had had to pack up and bolt before I remebered to take out my camera!)

I gave the students an overview of the techniques we’d cover including fused applique, using Angelina fibers (including ironing it over a stamp to get an impression), making a freezer-paper stencil and using both textile paints and Shiva paintstiks, making rubbings with the Shivas, free-form cutting (break loose from that template thing!), and making an edge-finish from yarn.

The first time I taught the class, the students had a hard time without a pattern to follow, so this time I made up 8 samples for possible postcards but encouraged them to “go for it.” I’m thrilled to say ALL of them did!!!!! No one used my patterns—HOORAY! I don’t know if it was the difference in the students, or that having the pattern there as a “safety net” to fall back on actually freed them up to wing it…who cares, I’m thrilled!

Sue spotted an applique quilt hanging on the wall (opposite where she is sitting), and launched into cutting this adorable snowman card (and given the near-arctic wind-chill outside, it was appropriate!). Here she is working on him, and in the “group
photo” below, he’s on the left. She cut the letters free-hand, and I think they look perfect!

Sharon made the postcard with two flowers saying “Heal” for her uncle, and Pam made the two on the right, including the lady with the bright “angelina” hair. Pam had brought a hideous / wonderful fabric, asking “what could you do with it, it’s SO ugly” It is pretty ghastly– pictures of the heads of LOTS of ducks…..I took one look at it and said no it’s not awful, it’s great…it could be rocks! Well, she got the idea: the loon’s neck is now striped socks on her lady and another head is the pocketbook (bottom right postcard in the group photo)!

Rachel barely made it to class, deciding to come only at the last moment. She brought some great upholstery fabrics and one or two commercially printed “hand-dyed look” fabrics. She used the latter and, loosely following one of my patterns, but cutting things free-hand herself, made this mountainscape with Shiva-paintstik through freezer-paper stencil snowcapped peak:

And Victoria made this Easter postcard, stencilled a great bolt of lightning, then added angelina to make it even more lightning-ey. We picked a couple different yarns from my stash (I take a bunch of stuff from my studio so students don’t have to buy a ton of stuff, which they can try and donate a modest fee to the “replenish the stash fund” and, if they like, then go buy themselves), and thought the gold and variegated tan twisted together looked best.

I’m SO happy with the postcards these ladies made! I’m finding that my estimate of students being able to make four or six postcards is way too high…most made one or two, but it has these folks bursting out of the box…COOL!

Well, it has been nearly two weeks since Coastal Quilters met (the local quilt guild chapter), and it has taken me this long to blog about it! That’s what happens when you’re switching computers, making two quilts, and doing all the other stuff besides! Since I gave a talk on thread, I was a bit discombobulated, and just enjoying show and share, when I realized I really should be taking pictures! I missed some great quilts, but got the OK from Betty and Carrie to share these two.

Betty is an AMAZING quilter! I told her that day that she has, hands down, the best “eye” for composition and basically everything out of anyone in the group including me, Jan, Roxanne and everyone else. Here she is (trying to hide behind her quilt). She does all her work by hand, and has a small apartment, so her pieces are small. This one has the most gloriously stitched and beaded dreamcatcher on the front…wish I had gotten a detail photo of it!

Carrie Hedstrom is a young (well, compared to me! Anyone under 40 qualifies as young!) mom, and budding art quilter who has recently joined our ranks. She used a piece of McKenna Ryan’s gradation fabric for the center of this piece (I think the colorway was this one) :

I thought it was a very effective usage of the fabric, and the quilting was interesting too…can’t wait to see where she goes/grows from here!

And you may have heard (including here, from me!) about our sub-zero Fahrenheit weather. We are in a mild spell..it got up to about 31 or so today, but this past weekend (when I was off teaching, then downstairs working on Monday and Tuesday) I didn’t turn the heat on in my studio / workroom over the unheated garage. MISTAKE! The heating pipes FROZE. You’d think the frozen-solid water in the cup inside my car would have been a clue, but nope…I was clueless. Well, we put electric radiators in both the room and the garage (with its single pane windows, one of which has two broken, cereal-box-covered panes) to thaw things out. The good news is that I have turned the water supply to the pipes which heat the baseboard heaters, and so far no apparent leaks or water damage…we may have dodged a bullet…PHEW! Ripping out walls to repair ruptured pipes isn’t fun, or cheap!

Meanwhile, Paul took this pic of three of the cats asleep in his room. They know what to do on a cold winter’s day in Maine! Tyger is the orange tabby, Zeus is the Siamese, and Hannah Chan is the mackerel tabby. Smart kitties!