season of busy

It is December. A birthday month for me. It is a month of busy. It is dark too soon . It is light too late. It is a month of two full moons....
We all have much to do. Holidays. I love the festive lights. The songs of the season. There is much I simply enjoy about this time of year. I will not dwell on the negative.

I find time to stitch a bit here and there on this and that. Snow fell. It looks so serene in the early dawn light. It is raining now, more snow to come...

Once in a blue moon I find time for a blog post...

Girlfriends page done!

Bad photo but since I nearly sent this off before photographing it tis better then nothing! This one is for Cathie's book. http://www.clevelandgirlie.blogspot.com/ I had the toughest time with this as she had a request to use a quote we liked and go from there...I don't have favorite quotes. Its not that I don't think them worthy, I just rarely remember them. But, I love music and when listening to the radio the John Lennon song was playing and I just really liked the line " We all shine on, like the stars and the moon and the sun" So that line fostered this page. Everyone shines in some way.

I talk to myself when I stitch

Do you talk out loud as you stitch? Even when there is no one else around? I do. And here is a sampling of the mutterings uttered while working on the pillows and baby quilt...

mistakes are a learning experience.mistakes ARE a learning experience....I am learning waaay to much...
RIGHT sides together dammitt....
uh oh.....cut the wrong edge...
that wont be noticeable...
RATS, it sticks out like a fur coat in august...
where did I stick that needle...
How did THAT happen?
the ruler must be off...
OW! found the needle, good idea putting it in my foot....
expletives deleted..
It is relaxing, its just that this one part is a bit off....a teeny tiny bit...off...wheres my needle again..( this last said to husband when he questioned my claim of stitching relaxes me)

Photos coming as soon as I get home when it is light enough out to take them!

pondering

copying..or influence.. My current work in progress, well one of the three anyway, has me shy to show it as it is similar in some ways to an artists work I much admire. No, it is not a copy. There are marked differences. It is the subject matter. That being one that I closely associate with her work. I drew the design with no thought to her work conscious in my mind, played with it for days, committed it to cloth and fiddled and fuddled with it. Now I look at it and see the influences. Is it my work? Did I unconsciously copy?? Yikes! I know I drew it, started stitching etc. Is it 'mine' enough to really be mine? I know it is but the question niggles at me and has me insecure about this one. I look at it anew. No it is different. the similarities are in materials and subject matter . I am sure there is influence here in my approach to the workings of it. I will send a post to my influential artist to see what she thinks. ...In a cosmic coincidence as I was pondering all this I see Arlee has posted a similar bit about this sort of thing on her blog. http://arleebarr.squarespace.com/designjournal/2009/12/1/etheror-an-interim-post.html I wonder if we all face this from time to time. Especially when attempting something a bit out of our usual realm. What do you think?

Working on...

I have decided that the pillow top needed to be quilted...have finished the first one and am working on the second one now.

Pillow #1 above and #2 below. The blue tint is not true to life. It is a creamy white.
And since I have so much free time (lunatic giggling commences here) I have decided to do something that has been playing around in my head for a long long while. I have turned a sketch from my lowly sketchbook into a larger fabric drawing/painting on whole cloth. This has been a trial of starts and stops as I attempt to recreate my original drawing into a quilted work. There are mistakes. I am overlooking them as I go on with this. A bit of a learning experiment and flying by the seat of my pants as I have NO clue how I will quilt it. IF this works out I have others that I would like to turn into fabric/textile/quilt art.
Above is the original drawing. 8.5 x 11". Below is the whole cloth painting 17 x 22".

progress on the pillows

the embroidery is finished for the first pillow. It will be a fourteen inch square. I just need to make it into a removable pillow case for the form so it can be washed easily. It has been washed once but not pressed at this point. The second pillow top is moving along nicely. Photos later.
As for the baby quilt..it is basted and the major in the ditch stitching is done. Nothing fancy going on with the quilting for this one. I will take pictures when I get to the binding. Hopefully sometime before Christmas....Where does the time GO??