Two Finished in December 2008

Here is Sarah's quilt. I designed the quilt and cut all the pieces of fabric from my 2006 stash in a kind of double-charmed style (2 triangles of each piece of fabric in my stash). Recently, the pieces were sewn together by my mom, Sarah's mother-in-law, and her mother. Pretty much this quilt would never have been finished without help from these ladies. I got extra-wide batik backing from Sewbatik on the internet and shipped the top and back off to a quilter to be long-arm quilted with variegated thread since the thing is king-size. My mom graciously agreed to handstitch the binding.
I finished this Puzzle quilt today, binding finished. This is one of my favorite quilts so far.

Puzzle quilt

I have finally finished the binding on this quilt.

It seems like binding always takes me forever. And here is detail on my favorite quilting motif. I need to have someone show me how to properly adjust the tension on my machine.

I'm still working on my Art/Gratitude Journal in December. I'm getting the ideas on the page but embellishing them is another story. Here is another one I like. I affixed a strip of lovely fabric to the left side, then drew out the rest of the design, expanding off the strip inspiration.

More Flyes

I'm having fun with these butterflies. I did a few using watercolor, but they didn't have the same color intensity. I'll do it again once I get a brush suitable for watercolor. I should take some kind of course on brushes. I've got about ten different brushes, all good brushes, but I think they are more for acrylic and I need one with a finer point that can hold all the water that loads up onto the brush when I'm doing watercolor.

More ART, fish STAMP, and BUTTERFLYs

12-06 (this is an awesome photo of Sophia at the zoo - I love her carefree-ness):12-05 (one of my favorite poems, a Robert Frost classic):

I carved this fish stamp out of a pink eraser (very pliable, moreso than the linocut stuff I had been using - pink eraser is my new favorite substance for carving). I got this idea directly from Geninne's Art Blog, who is very creative with stamps and has a lovely tutorial. I have wanted to make more stamps but generally feel stumped as to what to carve, so I found a fish on her site I liked and drew one like it on the eraser, then carved away: And another butterfly (I love watching the process by which these little guys come about - it's probably the first thing I've ever made where I actually like the product better than the process or the idea, unlike most every bed-quilt I've ever made, where I usually hate the thing by the time I'm halfway through, which either has to do with the loathing of the work aspect, or the creating a sense of hate towards it so I can bear to part with it when I'm done aspect):

The butterflies are quite homely until their final stage of creation: the black ultra-fine sharpie marker over the colored pencil color. It turns out you can go through quite a few sharpies this way, as the wax in the colored pencil seems to destroy the tip of the pen.

Butterflies!!!

So I've started drawing butterflies in the last few days - wild and crazy colorful butterflies. And then I use them in my collages, and on envelopes that I'm mailing to people. What fun!