Fabric, skin, feathers, and fur

Hello out there.  Ummmmmm.....  What to say???

The kits for Holiday Blocks are put together.  I sure hope I win them.  The colors make me happy!

I finished another churn dash top for Patchwork Memories.  Borders are in the works, and I have t-shirts waiting to be stabilized for another custom t-shirt quilt.

We were blessed with a visit from Middle Daughter, Poyla, and Stardust!  What can I say?  Grandmother heaven.  :-)  The skull quilt was a hit with the parents.  Stardust reserved judgment for the time being.   The ceiling fan was much more interesting.

We had great-grandparent love.

Grandmother love.

And even a little Tramp time.  No success convincing her he's scary.  LOL

The obligatory photo of the four generations.   Though someone was much more interested in the ceiling fan than the camera-dad. 

We exuded cuteness.

We found our toes for the first time.

We laughed.

We cried.

We went to the park.

And just had the most wonderful weekend.  Stardust also got to meet her New Zealand cousin (Grand #3) via webcam.....who apparently, has just discovered his belly button.  Too cute!

Charlie had a good week too.  I added another treat cup to his play stand.

And bought him some peanuts in the shell.  It took him a day or so to figure out that they needed to be torn apart to get at the good part.

And of course the dogs are always waiting for something to be dropped.

He always rushes over to see if he can get hold of the camera.  And this time he managed to snatch the strap.  :-)

The dogs have had some exciting newness too.  Yep.  At the local dog park! 

I stopped there for a preview and promptly got all our proofs of rabies etc together and went to buy the dog park permit. 

Our first visit was yesterday evening.  It got dark enough for the overhead lights to come on, so the pictures from my phone are dark and blurry.  (Yes, our dogs really are in the photos.)  There was somewhere between twenty and thirty dogs having the best time in the one acre park.  It's a nice place and we met a bunch of really nice people.  I'll try for some daytime photos next time.  :-)

Play date

Kathie and I had another mental health day today.  :-)  We ended up at my house again since my car was in the shop (sigh).  Our play time consisted of experimenting with sun dying.  We used the instructions in Karen Eckmeier's article, "Sun Prints With Tissue Paper," from Quilting Arts Magazine, Summer 2006. 

We tore up a rainbow of art tissue, wet our fabric, cut up some plastic bags to work on, put on our old clothes, mixed our paint colors, and got busy "painting" our fabrics with "sun" paints. Then we lay torn strips and chunks of tissue paper over the wet paint and lay it all out in the sun to dry.  Dying fabrics is not something I do, so this was a fun new experience.

The hot Carolina sun dried things up pretty quickly.  This one still has the tissue paper on it.

And after I peeled the paper off!

You can almost see landscapes in them already!

Then we played with putting shapes, in this case leaves, on the fabric before we placed it in the sun.  A sun resist?  I saw a similar thing on How About Orange, though she used light sensitive dye.  So we didn't have a clue if it would work.

As Kathie would say, "Cool beans!"

After lunch we got onto our other project.  We are making up a set of Holiday Block kits for our quilt guild.  We have permission to use Bonnie Hunter's Happy Scrappy Houses pattern.  And made a good start cutting the strips and squares for the kits.  Two blocks in each of 21 kits that will be sold for a nominal fee at the next guild meeting along with a whole bunch of different kits (we hope!).  There is a small budget for fabric (as yet unspent) but most of this is from my stash.  Can you tell I lean towards brights?  Last time Kathie and I did this, two or three years ago, I won our set of Holiday Blocks at the December meeting!  Yikes.  Another UFO!  I think I better dig those out and make a quilt from them. 

This is the "dog bed corner" of our bedroom.  Nothing much bothers Maisy as long as there are cushy beds scattered around the house for her to lie on.  Talk about the lap of luxury.  :-)  The other two get hot and like to lay on the tile floors in the kitchen and bathrooms.  Not our crazy Maisy! 

Jelly what???

Yesterday I spotted this link on someone's weblog.  (I forget who.  Yikes!  I'm sorry.)  Jelly races!  In which you make "Jelly Roll 1,600 Quilts."  What fun!  So today I had a race with myself.

 And I won!!

Yes, I know.  I used a Bali Pop rather than a Jelly Roll.  It's called a Jelly Roll 1,600 because when you string the whole lot together in one hugely long strip it's 1,600 inches long.  If you think better in feet that's 133.33 feet.  Or 44.44 yards.  (Metric thinkers...you're on your own.)  The first seam is a doozy.  800 inches (66 feet, 22 yards)!  So when they say start with a full bobbin....they mean it.  :-)  And as I'm stitching away I'm thinking, "Wow, I am using a lot of thread!"  Then came the "DUH."  Just because it's loooong seams it doesn't mean I'm using more thread.  Sheesh.  It's not good when my mind wanders.  So I put a movie on.

It's over!

For us anyway.  Hurricane Irene has gone north.  The Sailor Son is still out to sea as far as I know.  In New Jersey, one daughter is trapped at home as the river is in the road,

and the other one has downed power lines blocking her street.

My brother (at the Jersey Shore) reports that his yard is a mess and they lost several trees.  Here in central North Carolina we were just west of most of the action.  It's been really bad for some folks though.  :-(

So what do you do on an unusually stormy day?  You (hopefully) feel secure in your preparations.  We went out at the last minute and bought two of these 5 gal Coleman water containers.  Very cool.  When it was clear the storm had passed I asked The Tramp to get them out of my kitchen sink so I could make dinner.  He put them on the kitchen table for me and we figured we'd use the water over the next few days.  But what did I find this morning?  They leak!  Water all over the table, soaked into a chair cushion and spreading on the floor.  Sigh.  Some security.

What else do you do on this stormy day?  You keep checking out the windows to see what the weather is doing.  The birds were bereft.  Where in the world had the bird feeders disappeared to?  :-)

You watch and wonder if there will be enough rain to overflow the pond. (Nope)

Then, while you wait for the kitchen timer to say the eggs are ready,

 you amuse yourself teasing your parrot with the camera.

But he doesn't mind.....because he always gets goodies when you're cooking.

And the dark day becomes a bit cheerier with warm egg salad for lunch.

And finally, you sit down for an afternoon of sewing with the cool fresh air blowing in.  But you have to anchor your fabric pieces down or they keep blowing on the floor!

And you finish one churn dash memory quilt top.  (Phew!) (borders not chosen yet)

And finally, you go out one more time for a look at the stormy sky reflected in the pond.

Goodnight Irene.