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From My House to Yours

October 30th, 2006

In one of those bursts of activity…occasioned by not having been able to sew for a while…I finished up a whole BUNCH of postcards! Since I leave for Houston tomorrow, I’ll try to do two or three posts today and in the morning. Our internet service was down for nearly 36 hours (EEEK!) due to the storm and winds here in Maine yesterday, so am behinder than ever!

This short little series called “From My House to Yours” were sent as thank you notes to my dear Frayed Edges friends for their birthday thoughtfulness!

I really like using yarns to “bind” the edges of the cards…faster than satin stitching, and frequently has a nicer, more finished look to it. And an added design element! For the card at the top, I twisted two lengths of the same yarn together to get a bulkier look (Lion Brand yarn…the one that is thick and kinda curly looking in the skein). I also have some wonderful cottons leftover from a sweater, and use them often.

Deborah’s new house near Dallas has arched windows if I recall from the pictures, so I sent this one to her:

For these last two postcards, I wound two cotton yarns together as I couched them to the edge of the card to get the twoo-tone effect.

Next post: the Hot August Night series continues!

A more relaxing day, and postcards for sale

October 27th, 2006

Had a glorious day today….since tomorrow is due to be sodden and surly, and since I’m driving 4+ hours round trip to teach at Cote Brothers in Auburn, I went for a bike ride today. First, however, I got rid of two albatrosses: I hemmed hubby’s karate pants and repaired Joshua’s backpack, and started on a third: Eli’s Halloween costume. About 11:30 I set out and rode about 8 miles over rolling hills…just out route 135 to the town limits and back: the skies were blue with puffy white clouds, some trees still have autumn leaves, but many branches are bare letting more and more light down to the ground.

THEN, drum roll, I actually got to sew some…I hope on Sunday I can post pictures of my most recent postcards, in the Hot August Night series (discreet nudes). In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that these three cards are for sale ($30 each, includes regular first class postage in the US)–the one above is called Turtle Moon. If you’re interested, let me know by Monday, because on Tuesday I head to Houston for Quilt Festival (hooray!). This first one below is Confetti Moon:

And here is Winter Tree:

Just for fun, I’m posting pics of the last remaining available card in the Hot August Night 2005 series…which is mounted on a painted canvas ($90)

and my favorite one of the whole bunch:

Update on Chinese site and Berea, KY

October 26th, 2006

Good news…I got a response from Baidu, the Chinese website referring me to their webmaster, but since at least half a doze folks from here and the QuiltArt list have said that Baidu is the Chinese language version of Google, I have relaxed about the whole thing. Fascinating, though, that someone found me in China!

And….if you are from Berea Kentucky and surfed in last Friday or Saturday evening, you were the 20,000th visitor and (if you’d like it) have won a free pattern. If I don’t hear from you by the time we hit 25,000 (we’re approaching 21,000 now) I’ll do the drawing again. I know that someone from Berea has visited a few times, but they aren’t as regular readers as many of you…thank you all!

Teaching today, so no pics this morning, but hopefully some tomorrow. And if Blogger cooperates (always an iffy proposition), I’ll continue to upload pictures of my journal quilts. That way when I’m in Houston I can try to log on and upload a few new posts with the journals…I can’t share them until Nov. 1, when Festival officially opens, so we all have to wait until then. Toodles…gotta fix Eli breakfast and get him on the bus, then into the car to teach!

Update…Chinese website

October 25th, 2006

Well thanks to my loyal readers and the folks on the QuiltArt list, it appears that Baidu is the Chinese language equivalent of Google, and the page is a variant on the theme of “Google Images.” So it’s a search engine page of images that pulled up my postcard! Cool….bizarre that it would happen (I think of myself as a tiny voice in the universe and being “found” on the other side of the world in a script that doesn’t even come close to anything I can read is wild!)…but cool.

So I am now not only not panicked that someone is trying to steal my design (this comes up a lot on the quilt designers list…so I’m not paranoid…alas there are Chinese companies that have plagiarized patterns by US designers), but also happy that the internet brings us closer once again.

Wild!

Image stolen–anyone read Chinese?

October 25th, 2006

Well, in browsing my site meter today I discovered something potentially disturbing: MY postcard, the springy flowers one on a Chinese website! The good news is that it DOES show a link to my site, but the fact is they didn’t contact me for permission to copy the image or blog about it. I have asked them to remove it from their site (after random clicking on hotlinks in Chinese script I came across one in Roman letters that said “about Baidu” and that had a contact page).

Does anyone out there read Chinese? If so, would you be willing to go to this link and tell me what it says? If it were someone else’s blog, I wouldn’t be concerned, but there is so much theft of artwork and it appears to be a company website. Fascinating….it is a company that is traded on the Nasdaq, and seems to be about internet services. Anyway, IF they are simply showing that they can provide services, then I’m OK with them placing the picture (free advertising? in Beijing?), but it does concern me. Thanks!