WIPs

I’ve finally realized that I can’t post very often if I keep waiting for a finish!  There are so many works in progress, that I seem to be always working, but never have a finished item to show.  Personally, I enjoy reading blogs that show how a piece progresses.  Apparently I am not good at that kind of post.  But I’m going to try – at least once!
 

Beginning with quilts . . . this one is soooo close!  Just one more border, but it is really big already.  Borders get harder to sew the larger the quilt in my experience.  The story behind this quilt is that the butterflies were designed and appliqued by my MIL in the year before she died.  She had finished the blocks, planned the layout in Electric Quilt, and purchased all the fabric for sashing and borders.  So I decided to finish it.  And I’m still finishing it!  Probably one more sewing day for this one, then I can show you another Quilt In Progress.

For dolls, this one has been in progress for quite awhile.  I think the doll herself was a muslin pattern tester.  I dressed her at a club meeting earlier this year.  She needs a face and shoes.  And probably more embellishing.

This little guy IS finished, although I don’t know what I’ll do with him.  On a whim, I purchased some Heather Bailey patterns and made this of scraps from one of my quilt tops.

This cheeky fellow is coming along nicely.  Sarge found him a nice stump to lean against and I can now finalize his pose.  Arms come next.  I have the hardest time doing hands, so it may take awhile before there is more progress to show.  Yes, he’s pretty skinny in the thighs, but I do plan to put pants on him, so they will be fine in the end.

While I had clay out, I did these fun faces following a video by Fabiola Perez.  She made hers to look like Santa’s elves, but I’m thinking of something a little different.  They need some antiquing and then something to be mounted in/on.

My most recent sculpt . . . a certain “jolly old elf”.  I had to get something holiday-themed in here!  Lots more work before he’s done, though.

That’s all I have pictures on so far.  Let’s see . . . there’s an owl, two more quilt tops, an embroidery cloth, some new art journal pages . . . then there are the projects all lined up to put into the queue.  Good grief!  Who has time for housework?  (hee hee!)


Now, if I can stay on task long enough to finish any of this, I’ll be back here to show you eventually.

So Much For November

Well, November has been pretty much a bust as far as creativity goes around here.  I have several works in progress – but the progress has been So-o-o-o Slo-o-o-o-o-w!  So slow, in fact, that there hasn’t been much of anything to take photos of. 

One reason I haven’t been very crafty involved a trip to the ER and a quick surgery to remove a “rotten” gall bladder.  Medical procedures are so advanced these days!  Quick in and out and three weeks later I’m as good as new.  Except for those four little scars, anyway!

 

But the MAJOR disruption has been a new laptop for my studio/sewing room.  I do a lot of planning, designing, and creating on my computer and it was past time for an upgrade.  I was running out of space, and everything was getting bogged down and frustrating!  So I shopped around and worried about the cost and all that, and finally ordered a Toshiba.  I knew it would take some work to install my software and transfer (a lot of) data files, but I used to do this all this time.  Plus, I had a PLAN.

I’m sure you can see what’s coming . . . even Plan B was not.quite.working.  You see, several of my applications need to have internal data exported and imported, which I did.  The real problem, tho, was with tagging my files in Photoshop Elements.  I have about 40K digital art files cataloged in PSE, and without tags I would never find anything.  (I want to note here, that each letter of the alphabet in each style and/or color is an individual file.  Still, I DO have a lot of stuffs!)  So I was careful to write-to-metadata and import-with-tags and likewise mumbo jumbo.

Imagine my reaction when I discovered that roughly half of those files did not come through with any tags at all!  Well, maybe you don’t want to think about that!  So, for the past most-of-a-month, every moment I can spare has gone into re-tagging all those files.  Thankfully, I have learned some tricks and shortcuts over the past year so it isn’t quite as awful as it could be. 

And I’m down to about 2 thousand files, which is pretty darn good!  I’m hoping to have something creative to show you pretty soon.  Thanks for your patience.  And thanks to Microsoft ClipArt, ClipartOf.com and DeviantArt.com for the pictures in this post.  I couldn’t post without pictures of some kind!

Productive Week

A number of finishes this week!  I had some appointments, too, so I’m not sure how I managed to be so productive.  Sometimes the stars align properly!

This is from Bethany Reynolds’ book “Stack-n-Whack-ipedia.”  I enjoy the process and had this piece of fabric I bought specifically for Stack-n-Whack.  I hoped it would make nice kaleidoscope blocks – and I was right!

Here’s a couple close-up shots.

I think this style appeals to my hidden mathematical side.  The blocks are very precise and geometric – yet there is a total randomness to the way each block turns out.  I suspect there will be more of this at some point!

Today’s finish is another block from the Seasonal Silhouettes BOM.  If  you look closely, you can see there are three apples in the center.  I haven’t decided exactly how I’ll finish the details on these, but hopefully the apples will pop a bit more when I do.  Just four more blocks before I have to make some decisions!

Lastly, a two-page spread in my Art Journal.  I picked up some Margaret Applin stencils for creating mandalas and have worked on this page in odd moments through the last couple of weeks.  The stencils contain designs in an arc and you can use the same stencil all around (like the background mandala above), or do all sorts of mix and match – which I did on the foreground mandala.  I’ve been reading that drawing mandalas is used in meditation and spiritual healing.  I don’t know about the spiritual part, but I know I could zone out really well while coloring these in!

In other news, the pugs went walk-about this afternoon – yes, again!  I knew which direction to start looking, so they were not very far away.  Jake “needed” to be carried home.  Wuff – he’s heavy!!

What about you – do you draw mandalas?  Do you meditate while drawing/coloring?

Remember This Guy?

Don’t feel bad if he doesn’t look familiar – it’s been more than two years since I first showed him here.

I have a number of heads that I don’t really know what to do with.  It can be pretty spooky poking around in my studio!  Recently, though, I’ve been inspired to add bodies to some of the heads.  Including this guy.

 

This is what he looks like so far.  And – yes – I plan for him to be a “he”.  I couldn’t quite picture a female figure with those teeth!

Another angle.  As usual, my camera doesn’t quite capture the color.

And since the oven was warmed up, I started on this one, too. 

I seem to be on a roll here!  Stay tuned for further developments.

Bi-Monthly Report

Shall we try for a Quarterly Report next time?  Semi-annual?  Heck, let’s just jump right to Annual!  Or . . . maybe not.  I don’t really want to lose all my readers – all three of you that are left, anyway!

I’m going to skip the excuses (there are many) and get right to showing what I’ve done recently – of which there are many as well!

Quilts:

This was a kit from the local quilt shop.  I’ve had it for awhile, but it went together pretty fast once I decided to work on it.

This is from a pattern called “Take Five On-point”.  The package says you take 5 minutes to choose 5 fabrics and in 5 hours you’ll have a finished top.  Well, it took more like 10 hours, but that included coffee breaks and gossip time, so I’m thinking that’s about right!

This table runner was a quick project after a friend showed us how to layout charm squares for a simple runner.  I wanted something for Fall and I happen to have this charm pack from a Shop Hop – who knows when!  For awhile I was buying charm packs a lot, until I realized I didn’t know what to do with them!  I’m getting more ideas now.

Art Journal Emporium:

August was pretty busy, but things slowed down in September somewhat.  At least in my Art journal!  Here’s a couple of exercises from Pam Carricker’s “Creating Art at the Speed of Life”

Digital Scrapping:

Dolls & Other Things:

A couple of projects from my doll club’s August and September meetings.  Top picture is my box “totem”.  We collaged and embellished boxes or square cubes with symbolism that had a personal meaning.  I made mine so there are three storage compartments.  You know – for secrets.  Ha!

The bottom picture is two cone dolls.  These are literally cardboard cones that I’ve collaged onto.  We had a selection of clay faces to choose from, and multiple face molds.  I used several of the molds and I have a couple more cones, so I can do more dolls.  These are too much fun!

That’s about it.  Two months gone by in a rush – but fun projects got done anyway!

Want to see what I’m working on next?

It involves this fabric.  The fuchsia flowers match the trim in my sewing room.  Sarge was sooo nice to paint it since he really dislikes fuchsia! 

Now to get back to sewing and scrapping!

Not-Monthly Report

It’s past time for an update on my crafty doings, so here is what I’ve been up to in July into August.

Quilts

I have another finish! 

This was a Block of the Month from Julia Wood at The Hexie Blog last year.  I actually had all the blocks finished shortly after the New Year.  And it didn’t take me very long to put them together.  But then I decided to add the tiny hexie flowers at the block intersections, and that took longer.  A LOT longer!  I’m not sure why – when I decided to get busy and just finish it already!, it was done in one afternoon.  Isn’t that the way it goes sometimes?

Speaking of Blocks of the Month, this is the one I am doing this year.

This one is called Seasonal Silhouettes by Edyta Sitar, and my local quilt shop is providing the kits.  I am actually up-to-date on this one since it started in April.  Hopefully it won’t take me eight months to finish it after the twelfth block is done!

Art Journal Emporium

One of this month’s projects was a Glue Book.  This is just one of the pages I did.  Basically, it involves gathering pictures and papers together and glueing them down in a pleasing collage.  Not as focused as a regular collage because there is really no “message”, but not totally random either.  I have a small box that bits and pieces from other projects get tossed into.  For the Glue Book, I grabbed a few of them at random and then layered, tore, punched, and generally played until I liked what I had.  There will probably be more of these pages in my next – ahem – monthly review.

Digital Scrapping

Yeah, this is what takes most of my time.  A perfect match-up of my artistic side and my nerdy-ness!  Anyway, here is just a sampling:

There you have it – July in a few words and pictures.  Not so many pictures, actually.  I need to take them more often.  I’m pretty sure I did more than make a couple of quilts and play in PhotoShop.

On the other hand, maybe that IS all I did last month!

Done is Better than Perfect

I thought I’d jump in here and show you that I have actually been doing some sewing.  And I have a finished quilt top to show for it!

You know how bloggers show a picture and say that it looks crooked because of the camera angle?  Well, this quilt looks wonky because it is!!  It will present a real challenge for “quilting out the bumps” as they say.  But that particular headache is for another day, because this one was its own headache!

I inherited a set of 9-degree wedge rulers, and decided to give them a try.  I figured it would be a great way to use up scraps if I sewed long strips and cut the wedges from there.  I played around in Electric Quilt and came up with this layout and thought it would look pretty good.

Well.

For my first try using these rulers, I probably should have used a solid fabric instead of strips.  But you know what they say about hindsight.  So, it turns out that with all the seams and such, each wedge was not quite exactly a 9 degree angle.  So when it came time to sew the curved seams in each block, there was some fudging to do.  A. Lot. of. Fudging!  In fact, I wound up stitching a gathering line at the inside circle edge to help made everything fit.  It’s kind of fun to try to smooth this top out – you get one circle flat, then the others all bump up.  Kind of like Whack-A-Mole!

And I don’t want to talk about the border!  Just . . . no.

I was really disgusted with this project and swore I would never use those rulers again.  But, now that it’s been hanging on my wall for a couple of days, I kind of like it.  So, maybe I’ll try another project with those rulers after all.

Just not anytime soon!