Farm Progress Show Follow Up

Dear Readers: In my haste to get ready, load up the van and get to breakfast on time yesterday, it never once entered my head to get the camera!  I’m just not in the habit of carrying it with me to meals…yet!  I am going to have to get advice from Gerrie since she always has lovely pictures of food and meals, even when they eat out.

But I can describe it for you…we had a fruit dish of bananas and strawberries, small stack of pancakes, sausage patties, hard fried eggs with a soft white cheese melted on top (never had that before!), juice and coffee.  Yes, it was another wonderful breakfast.  If anyone questions my infatuation with my breakfasts the past few days…let me explain.  My husband goes to work early and we don’t fix breakfast.  Every morning I have a bowl of bran flakes with soy milk and dried cranberries on top…that is it.  Being at the bed and breakfast this week was quite a treat as far as breakfast was concerned!  And someone else was fixing it…and it was way better than the continental breakfasts you get at a motel for the same price.

Anyway, I sold a few more scarves yesterday…that was very encouraging.  Right before I left, I worked on some large square chiffon scarves and was quite pleased with how they turned out.  Every day I draped a new one over my “dummy” to see public reaction.  The third one sold, and it was one I ran out of time on and planned on doing more to it when I got back.  The sale saved me more work!

I still have these two…the one that sold was a bit more reddish than the orange one above.  I discharged it the same way, but didn’t like the color so I overdyed it.  The discharged areas were more muted.  I also used the same screen print on it that the orange one has.  It is a Thermofax print of a picture of tree branches.

I’m back home now and need to re-stock my inventory…next art show is in two weeks.

What’s Going On Now…

The Christmas artisan’s fair is over again.  I didn’t have a lot of sales, not enough actually, but it’s funny how one thing you do leads to another….I was asked to do a solo exhibit in a gallery…in 2011.  I think I can get ready in time!

So this week, I have a goal.  I am planning and writing up a proposal for a commercial commission job.  I had started it a couple of weeks ago, but then other things got in the way and took my attention and time.  Now it’s time to get dreadfully serious about it.  I’m not one to sit still and do a lot of paperwork and all the thinking that goes along with it.  Perhaps I need this exercise.  If nothing else, I am sure I will learn a lot.  So that is my plan for this week…after I go teach (that got cancelled)…and go to the dentist…and bake a cake for Jesus’ birthday party with my 3-5 year olds class at church…and make my nieces’ Christmas presents…and the list can go on and on.  It’s the holidays, right?  If you are already busy, the holidays just doubles or triples it for you.

My scarves are selling pretty well this season.  I’ve sold 4 out of my etsy shop in the past couple of weeks.  And I got a check from the shop I consigned a dozen to…she is selling them too.  I keep them pretty simple with what I do to them, because I am not sure that my current market will support higher priced work.  But when I do the exhibit, I think I will do some that are very special with more surface design on them.

Here is a rose pink silk crepe that I decided to do more to.  I was wanting to experiment with it a bit. It was going to be my play scarf.  I screened some words on it with a Thermofax screen.  Since the scarf was still a bit damp, the words blurred just a bit, not bad.  Not being satisfied with that, I came back with the discharge paste and a sea sponge and stamped it.  Perfect.  I wasn’t sure I even wanted to sell this scarf…but sadly (or happily, depending on your view) a girl wanted to buy it, so I “let” her.  Sigh.  Maybe I can duplicate it.  I really did like this one.

Wednesday This ‘N That…

I have been here, I just haven’t been blogging. You know… how LIFE gets in the way. Monday afternoon I had to go teach my sewing class with young girls. There are five of them, although not all of them sew when I am there. They are working on a quilt called Crooked Nine Patch. It was designed by my friend SuznQuilts and was made so that it is easy for kids to do. They are so excited and having so much fun. Sometime later I will take pics of their blocks to show you all the variety they have.

On Tuesday, I had errands to do and pick up a few groceries. My husband is working long hours in the field, so I am trying to keep the food train going for him and try to keep lunch somewhat interesting, since they eat on the run. But Tuesday afternoon, I decided it was time for me to do some sewing for FUN!!! I actually haven’t sewed anything much for quite some time. First, I worked on the hand stitched bag that I showed awhile back. I liked the pears that the Kemshalls stitched on their bag, so, lacking any other inspiration, I stitched pears on mine too and then added some paint. This is a birthday gift for a friend of mine and that birthday is coming up soon. She likes folk art and I have kept the pears imperfect and a bit funky in shape. Believe me, it wasn’t that hard to do…with free motion stitching. The next thing to do will be to bind it and shape it into the bag, then maybe add some beads by hand.

Creating art takes alot of brain power, so there are times when I just want to sit at the sewing machine and do mindless piecing. That’s my break from thinking…that’s my fun. This is when I like to pull out something unfinished and get back to it. Yeah, I still like traditional fabrics, and yeah, I still like muted reproduction colors. So except for getting the applique stitched down, I did get the borders on and the stars fused to the quilt. This ended up being a double bed size, but the fun thing about it is, it has 579 different fabrics in it. It is called Civil War Logs, again by my friend, SuznQuilts. It is all (as much as we can tell) civil war reproduction fabrics. Four of us started collecting them several years ago and trading strips around so that we all had that variety. In this particular quilt, each fabric has been used only once. It is windy out today, so I couldn’t photograph it on the clothesline. It just flies up like a sail!

I am quite pleased with it and am thinking of getting it hand quilted (probably not by me) in keeping with the Civil War look. I think I know some ladies who hand quilt every week around a big frame.

Today I finished emptying out the van from the festival and organizing everything in the garage. It’s hot out there. I am sweating badly. The other thing I am doing today is attempting to discharge rust dyed fabric. Yep, it works. Here are the results. The circles on the bottom are the discharged areas. Now I want to do some screenprinting with dye paint. How many different chemicals can this cloth stand?

I Love The Benefits….

One of the perks of painting, with either dyes or acrylics, is that when you finish with your project there is usually lots of paint on the brush and on the painting surface. I’m sure I have mentioned this before, but, I was raised by grandparents who went through the great depression in the 30’s; we didn’t waste anything. And I won’t waste my paint!

Paint rag, discharged with a round stencil brush. The surprise was seeing how the circles discharged in the different colors.