Hello,

It is  another  gray and rainy day here.  There are lots of reasons to feel down.  I am having trouble with the tension on my sewing machine.   It is very humid  and my hair is droopy. The sky is gray and all this rain even makes the Martha Washington  Greniums  hang low.  In my effort to empty some of  the excess rainwater from them , I accidenty spilled it all over my feet and my sandels are all wet.  Inspite of  all this stuff I still  feel happy.  I am making progress on my projects even with  the thread problem, because all the rain keeps me in the studio a bit more.  The birds are singing and I even saw one taking a bath in one of the mud puddles on my walk in the rain.  I noted too the circular patterns of falling rain in one of the puddles and thought it might make a good starting place for a quilting pattern.      So why I feel so good?   I believe it goes back to what my Dad always use to say to me as a kid” It ‘s not what happens to you that matters so much as what you THINK about what happens to you that matters.”    I am choosing to be happy about the possibilites of today.

Progress Report:   Dusty Trails    I am to the quilting stage of this project now.  I was tempted to just quilt in the ditch, but staying in the seam lines with the quilting  seemed like a cop out.  So  I am using is wandering stitch pattern that  reflects the seams instead.  My title has more to do with color than the stitch pattern. 

 New Iris  I am all done with the hand applique of the new leaves and flowers.   I was considering adding some of the fuzzy trim to the flowers as the beards of the iris.   The color has more red in it than the existing flowers but I really like the texture.   I guess it is again a  decision I can only make after I try it  and see how it looks.   That  really is the best approach any way.

 New project-Baby Quilt   My niece had a new baby last week  and so I am busy creating a baby quilt for the new child.  He as an older sister so I am putting two teddy  bears on this one.   The three butterflies allow me to add quilting for stability in the sky.  One might also be able to teach a little counting to a little one with this work.

 New work- East Window    I am creating a new window cover for the east room window.     When I work on these types of quilts I   first  do a wrogh  layout of where I think some fabrics will end up.      I am trying to start quilts now using fabrics I have altered in some way.  This time I used some marbleized  fabric, a piece from the soy wax class, and some painted fabrics.  When I have selected these materials, I chose  things that work with them.     I think of  the second choices as fillers and I cut them into strips of one and a half, two and a half and three and a half inch sections and sew them into long mixed units.   This method  means I can just add the units  to the fabric sections as I go along and do not have to keep stopping and cutting new fabric.  This method does create some unused material at the end of the assembley.  But I always just add that to my scrap basket and it becomes part of the material I use in my scrap happy quilts that I give as fund raisers .          I always enjoy my time doing the assembly process of quilt construction.

 

 

 Daily News  I have finished the base for the Daily’s now.  It is a black rectangle with 30  black velcro  units on it.   I put the quilt on the door to my studio so I see it first thing every day and my new habit has become to change the layout each morning.     Its a fun exercise and it means that I finish  several more  blocks every evening during the news like before.

 Keep  Creating

Carol