Where did the week go?

Not sure where the week went! Thursday we took pictures of the 50+ Art of Nature quilts for the upcoming exhibit. There are some spectacular quilts in this exhibit and this is where my wolves will for the next year.

Thursday night we met up with our friends Carol and Tony from Florida! They are here in Michigan waiting the birth of their fourth grand baby! I know they are excited about the new baby and also enjoy spending time with their family. It was fun catching up with them and of course having a great meal at Lucky's in Davison. Back to our house for some more talking and home made brownies. Mrs. Smith's recipe! My kids know this recipe. It's from one of my old patients back when I worked for Dr. Kerr and it's one we use all the time.

Friday I played with painting some tyvek for a new piece I'm working on. It's depicting the painting by Hokusai. Not sure it will turn out but it kept me busy!

Here is my journal quilt for this month (art of nature theme). This piece started out as a practice piece to just free motion quilt on when I want to try some new threads. But after I started quilting on it I thought it would look good as a journal piece!

I stamped a piece of hand dyed fabric with one of my first stamps I cut. The stamp is on the right and I printed on a piece of tissue paper (this piece is going in my altered book I'm working on) so you can see the pattern. This design is actually one of Patsy Thompson's quilting designs. She does some really nice quilting, designing patterns and has lots of info on her web site.

Then I printed on a light and dark piece of chiffon. This is the darker piece which I didn't use.

I quilted the entire piece then painted over some of the areas just to darker up. I took the stamped chiffon and covered up three of the leaves then free motion stitched on top and around the edges. I then cut on the outside to remove the excess chiffon and added beading (this is a rope pattern) on the 3 leaves and it's done! Here's a closeup of one of the leaves with the chiffon stitched on.

This is the finished journal piece (8 1/2" x 11"). I think it turned out pretty good. The lighter leaves where just stamped and stitched. I like the way the chiffon darkened up the leaves and gave them some more dimension.

So cleaning and laundry day today and maybe a little sewing. I'm finishing up beading on my shibori piece and I should have it ready to sew on facing while watching Tigers tonight!

Wed. with kids

So last Wed. I forgot to post our pictures from the trip to the water park in Oxford. We packed our lunch and took off to the park. Had lunch then off to the water pad and the kids had fun. Water was ice cold and gave them 'brain freeze' but they enjoyed the water. We went back to the playground area and they played for over 45 min. while Ginny and I sat and watched everyone. Then we treated ourselves to an ice cream cone. Just a nice day.
So this Wed. we stopped at the library and picked up free passes to the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills. What a day! We left at 10 to pick up the passes and arrived at the museum before 10:45. We didn't leave until after 3:30! So here's some pics of our day!

Ginny and Nick working on one of the inter active puzzles

Both kids deep in thought!

Digging for dinosaur eggs!

Holding up the dinosaur!

Trying to hold up the dinosaur and doing a good job!

Yes, Nick they are sharp!

This was a bat at the bat exhibit we went to! How cool is that!

This was another one we saw. Actually, she brought out 3 or 4 of them! Some as small as a few inches and the largest one was over a foot! She didn't bring that one out!

Here we are at one of the exhibits

And the best part. The kids rode the elevator by themselves (in the car garage!). Go figure they would enjoy this best!
All in all it was a really nice day at least for this grandma. Got to spend time with my kids and show Ginny some more gross things in the world. She wasn't crazy about the smells in the bat exhibit. They had a sloth in there as well and they only go to the 'bathroom' once every 10 days..guess what day this was! Yep! Until our next adventure!

Heat Transfer Printing using Disperse Dye

I'm also playing with a 1915 book that I'm altering! The book is called Metal Efficiency Common Sense and How to Exercise It. Is that a hoot! I think it's perfect for altering. I've only made one other altered book which was for the Florida Weaver's Guild Challenge last year. I did get four pages (book is quite small) painted yesterday and stitched around the edges. Now to put 'stuff' inside! Probably won't get to work on this until the weekend. This is the edges I punched holes into then I stitched. Pics to follow later this week.

My 1915 book!

I took a break from being Susie Secretary (helping Mary get exhibit forms updated for upcoming MQAI exhibit) and I played with the disperse dyes we bought last year. I did use these before and results are interesting but at that time I transfered on to Lutradur. Disperse dyeing is a process where you mix your dye powder w/water then you just paint the dye on paper..just regular copy/printer paper. Let the paper dry then you iron onto to your synthetic fabric (cotton doesn't work -although my printing area does have some dye on it!) I don't know if I took any pics at that time but here are some results I got yesterday.

These papers are from last year which is nice! Especially if you want to do this technique on the fly and don't want to wait for the paper to dry! Dye keeps on the paper for quite sometime! Years in fact!

Just another piece of painted paper.

I stamped the letters on first and allowed to dry, then I use the first paper and heat the dye on the fabric. I'm using a Batiste poly/cotton fabric.

This piece I laid some feathers and just cut squares of my painted papers.

This was the scrap piece of fabric I did all my ironing on. It had some light marks on it from the transfer of the dye through the fabric and I just added some more shapes.

This piece had leaves as a resist. After I used the leaves on above piece, I reapplied them and reprinted. The dye remains on the leaves so you can now use them to print with. Pretty cool!

I really liked this piece (above) and while showing Bob my squares, I had the 'art word' piece under the floral piece. I like the way the words show through so I think this is a good design! Now let's just hope with stitching you can still see the words. Worth a try!

Breaking Traditions 2009

So my two best buds and I are finished with our 'Home' 12"x12" quilt for the Breaking Traditions traveling exhibit (see my previous blog entry) to donate to A Place To Bark animal rescue. I'm mailing our entries in today.

My bud, Carol, was the first to finish! Her piece is called SUNLIT! Isn't she cool! Carol is working on a larger piece for our Art of Nature exhibit which will resemble Sunlit. Carol painted her piece then enclosed it in a house shape.

Here is a close up of the detail of her painting and machine stitching. Nice job isn't it! Click on the picture to see the detail.

This my my other best bud, Mary, with Homer's House! Homer is Mary's grand daughters dog but lives with Mary. He's a sweetheart. Mary is going to give this to her great, grand daughter since she and Homer are best buds!


Check out all the detail and hand stitching in this piece. There are little bone buttons on the bottom left; buttons in the trees and Homer hanging out the dog house window is just so sweet!!! Check out Mary's web site. She does beautiful work and is certainly an inspiration to us.

And this is my finished piece Our House is now a Home! I really had fun working on this piece. I've been wanting to use light weight metal in another piece and this seemed to fit. I had some left over painted fusible web I put on the roof and added beading on the sun and trees along with hand stitching for the grass.

You might be able to see the beading in the sun a little better if you click on the picture. This was a new design I've been playing with from my Margret Ball's book.

More Stamping

In between beading and hand stitching, I managed to finish Lesson 2 exercises in my online lino cut class. This last exercises in this lesson dealt with lines for texture, using the computer to obtain a photo and pattern and texture.

I combined each of the exercises and here's my results. This is a picture Dawn took in England a year or two ago. Not sure where it was taken...I'll have to ask. I printed out the pic and traced areas onto my stamp matt.

Here's my stamp cut
My first print - not too bad..this is only 3"x5" so I wasn't going to struggle with lots and lots of detail.

Then I wanted to add some texture to it but again, didn't want to do fine, fine, detail. So I took my tree stamp I made and masked off some of the area on the edges; printed it on my fabric; then printed my arch with a different paint. Not bad. I made several of these and I think they'll make nice fiber cards.

Next, was creating a stamp with a pattern and texture. I was looking at photo's, books, etc. and then got to thinking about my doodling and free motion quilting. I made this small piece about two years ago when I was just practicing free motion work. Why not use it for my inspiration!

So I scanned in my little quilt; printed off the sheet and traced around some of the areas. Transferred to my larger matt (6 1/2" x 11"); added a larger leaf to it and here's my pattern and texture stamp!

I grabbed two small pieces of hand dyed pink fabric and stamped! The pink is really a nice, bright pink and with the contrast of the blue paint looks really nice. Looks kinda dull here.

Then I took another hand dyed piece and stamped the upper left and bottom right corners with the blue paint. For the upper right and lower left, I painted on some red/yellow paint for the larger leaf. I really like this piece. It's a fat quarter so I think it will make a nice smaller quilt as well.

I've really learned so much about stamping, painting, texture...you name it. This has been a great class for sure. Dijanne is a wonderful instructor and I can't say enough about how well she's prepared this online class. She's so sharing with her techniques, tips, history and just plain old communication. I'd love to take a workshop from her on any technique she teaches. Only problem is I don't want to leave town let alone travel to Australia! Oh well...online classes are the way to go!

Breaking Traditions 2009

I've been working on finishing up my 12" x 12" piece for the Breaking Traditions Art Quilt Exhibit. This is a traveling exhibit curated by Lynn Krawczyk and this year will benefit Bernie Berlin's dog rescue, A Place to Bark. In honor of Bernie's efforts to find orphaned and abused dogs permanent loving homes, the theme for the 2009 exhibit is "Home." I did mess up on my naming the quilt! For some reason, I had 'home' in my title but I changed it to 'house' when I printed it onto my background. What was I thinking..oh well..the meaning is the same. Our house/home does belong to Mandy and she is in our hearts!!

So this was a hand dyed (background fabric) piece I did a few years ago. Always knew it would come in handy for some piece of art work! I stamped the trees beside the house and you can see where I was designing my house with metal for the seams. Aren't those footprints just the sweetest!
So here's my 'house' saying. Here's some of the quilting I did on the background.

I did transfer down the footprints and writing with the TAP transfer paper by Lesley Riley. Worked really well. You can't iron over the transfers but I kept that in mind. I didn't have any of my hand stitching in the grass area around the footprints. I'm still working on filling in those areas now.

So here's my finished house with Mandy looking out the front door. Yes, that's a front door! It is to me! You can see some of the beading in the trees if you click on the photo. I have some more beads to add on them. I embossed and cut strips of light weight metal and sewed the down on the house. The roof is made of painted fusible web that I fused onto fabric.

This shows a little more of the piece. I have some darker threads to hand stitch in the grass yet over the free motion quilting. Mary, Carol and I are sending in our pieces together and I'll be mailing them on Monday. Actually, this is the first time Carol finished something before us! Good going, Carol! Her piece is really nice! and I'll have to ask if she minds if I put it on my blog. I'll be getting Mary's sometime Sunday or Monday. I am putting a black and white binding on the piece just to jazz it up some more. This is a playful exhibit (I think!) and I do want my piece to be just that...playful!

A Place to Bark Animal Rescue

This is a video that needs to be watched. It's not depressing! Just the opposite. It shows Bernie with the animals she saves and loves so much.

Also, please nominate A Place to Bark by voting at the Christie Cookie Charity give away. It only takes a second and the money would certainly be wonderful for all the animals that Bernie takes in. This is all the info you'll need to fill in the vote.

Charity Name: A Place to Bark

Charity City: Portland

Charity State: TN

Charity Contact Name: Bernie Berlin

Your Name & Your Email

Art of Nature quilt pictures

I don't think Mary or Marty will mind me posting my finished piece on my blog. It's not like I get 1000 hits a day from artists that are part of this exhibit! Plus all the quilts have been handed in to Mary.

Hopefully, my little piece of art will entice those who live in our area to go and see the rest of the Art of Nature exhibit that will at the Greater Flint Art Council starting September 11, 2009. The Gallery will have the opening reception from 6:00 - 9:00p.m. on that day. You can find out more about where this year's exhibit (& also where last year's exhibit will be shown in 2009-2010) on Mary's web site. I believe there are at least 50 quilts on exhibit this year.

You can click on the photo's to see a closer view. The piece measures 20" x 24". Wolves are thread painted then sewn onto my hand dyed background. I have over 80 leaves, some fused but most dimensional.

Closeup of one of the wolves.
Closeup of some leaves. Stems are just twisted fabric that is zig zag'd down.

More leaves...if I had to make them my family and friends have to look at them!

And guess what! More leaves!

So now I have to work on my lino cutting class. We received Lesson 3 but I still have two exercises to do on Lesson 2! I'll post some pics of Amber's BD party later this week.

HAPPY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SWEET PEA!!

August 2, 1999

Amber Marie Soukup was welcomed into our world.

Happy Birthday, Amber!!

The day your Mom and Dad told us you were coming into their lives was a day I'll remember always! I'm sure they will too as I embarrassed them by screaming and crying! I was overjoyed. And now I can't believe it's been 10 years since I held you in my arms! I'm still overjoyed and love you so much. HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Enjoy your day! And remember you'll always be in my heart! Love, Grandma