A Cautionary Tale . . .

A little while ago, I received an invitation to join Facebook. It was from a friend I had not heard from recently and I thought this would be a good way to catch up. How naïve this thought was I did not realize at first. 

I was intrigued to discover many people I know with Facebook accounts and happily added Friends and waited for my Wall to fill up! For a little while nothing much happened. I saw a few notices of treasures found and achievements awarded, but they did not make much sense at the time. In the ‘real’ world, however, I began to hear comments about games and other activities on FB. Sure, some of those contained words like “addictive” and “time-sink”, but like most innocents I didn’t think it could ever happen to me! 

Then one day, I clicked on one of the treasure notices and watched a brief tutorial. Little did I know that as soon as I thought “This is cool” my life would be changed forever!

 

Now, I’ve exchanged visiting Facebook once a week for checking on my islands daily – no – three or four times a day to keep my animals from dying of neglect and my crops from withering on the vine! My friends are being pestered with unwanted gifts and requests for food, obscure idols, and Energy! All the while, the ‘real’ world friends find their e-mails unanswered and the family pets wait vainly for attention. At least none of them are dying – yet!

If you have not already made the fatal “click”, take a lesson from me.  Save yourself!  Stay with your quilting, stitching, or crafting.  Heed my warnings! I would tell you more, but the evil forces are attacking  and I must muster my troops to defend!

 

P.S.  Lest you are worried that all crafts are being ignored, here is a progress shot of one of my current projects:

Wednesday WOW - June 9

Doll pieces.  She's just about ready to assemble and then the fun begins!  And - oh, oh - look, Judy!  EQ7 arrived while I was out this afternoon!

Cinderella, My Way:

Trillian has received my Traveling Page for May, so I can finally share it with everyone else.  Her theme was Fairy Tales, and she specified that she wanted Grimm or Andersen fairy tales, rather than Disney.  

When I was very young, I had a collection of Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tales (as well as Hans Christian Andersen) and the book both fascinated and terrified me! The end papers were decorated with trolls and ogres and the stuff of nightmares . . . at least to my young mind! The images remain clear to me 50 years later.  But, of course, I loved the stories!

  I knew right from the beginning that I would do something about Cinderella. My first idea was the pumpkin carriage. But, when I re-read the original Grimm version – there is no mention of the carriage! That was when I remembered that the most fascinating part of the story, for me, was the search for the girl who fit the golden slipper. Yes, Jacob and Wilhelm’s Cinderella wore golden slippers. It might be interesting to learn how it evolved into a glass slipper, huh?

I acquired some collage art from Alpha Stamps and chose Cinderella praying at her mother’s grave as the image in the window.  I appliquéd the plush pillow and a golden shoe which I then filled with beads. The red heel reflects my favorite lines from the story:

Rook di goo, rook di goo!
There's blood in the shoe.
The shoe is too tight,
This bride is not right!

The collage art also included some black birds – although the Wikipedia Grimm’s Brothers version says the birds were pigeons - and I used my photo software to make a repeat and antiqued the color, then printed it onto silk for the backing page.

I really enjoyed refreshing my memories about this classic story.  I think it's a great story in all it's many versions.  Speaking of versions, if you have not read any of Gregory Maguire's slightly 'distorted' fairy tales, "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" is a very different way to look at the Cinderella story.  While I'm talking about favorites - I really enjoyed The Brothers Grimm, a fun movie with a lot of references to the entire collection of stories and a wobbly balance between dark adventure and magical fun. 

I'm busy working on the June page now.  Theme is the sea.  Lots of fun things I can do with that one!

Still More EQ6

I received a confirmation message on my copy of EQ7 today.  That means it will ship soon - like in 3 days!  Whoopeee!  I can't stand the excitement!!!

The more I experiment in this software, the more I realize how much there is yet to learn.  So, last month I signed up for a class on Quilt University.  The class I took was called EQ6 Building Blocks, taught by Fran Gonzales.  Man, oh man, did I ever learn a lot of cool stuff!

Since all four lessons were crammed with fun things, there's no way I can share all of it with you.  But wait 'til you see some of the highlights!

The primary purpose of the class was to learn how to analyze quilt blocks and then draw them in the software.

This block is called Origami and this is only one of the several color/fabric combinations I tried out.

 

It's also only one of the many blocks we learned to draw.  I put a few into quick quilt layouts just to see what would happen.

This block is called Palm.  It would be wonderful in the right fabrics, huh?

On this one I combined two blocks:  Log Cabin and New York Beauty.  Pretty hot!

The Dovetails block was a bonus exercise . . . and it took me a full afternoon to get it right!  I had to do something with it then, so I combined it with Texas Tears, which is a lot simpler.  I think they make a nice combination.

Then we worked on applique blocks.  Oooh, I may need to learn applique!

Fran led us through this first block step-by-step (but the fabric choices are all mine!  Can you tell?).  Then she encouraged us to try more on our own.

So, I came up with this one.  I decided to call it Winter Window after putting snowflakes in the window.  Lots of fun!

Fran designed this Daisy Chain and we used a Wreath tool to get the motifs in a circle.  I thought I'd try it out with one of the cone flowers I drew.

This is the quilt I put together using the cone flower wreath as a center.  This is the kind of thing that makes me enjoy looking at quilts.  As a bonus, I got some information about how to fix those blocks in the outer border.  They aren't quite square, but I can fix that simply by choosing another style of border.   Too easy!

Judy at Virtual Quilter suggested I play with the fabric libraries some more and I did get braver while working through this class.  What do you think, Judy?  Does this count?

Wednesday WOW - June 2

Blue stars are still coming along - slowly.  This is the last block pattern, tho, so maybe I will get busy on putting it all together.

Wednesday WOW - May 26

Well, the Hoffman project is finally started.  At least there's a head!

EQ6 and Fabric Selections

Judy at Virtual Quilter has been nagging encouraging me to play with using fabric in EQ6.  I needed to take some time to learn more about the fabric libraries first.

The default fabric selection is kind of tame for me, but I recently learned how to change the default selection, plus how to load a "custom" collection for the project file.  EQ provides a free fabric collection monthly and there are loads of luscious fabrics in each one.

Where to start?  One of my fabric colors is brown.  And one of the monthly collections was - surprise - browns!

 

Wish I could remember who these fabrics are by.  I just wrote down Winter Wonderland. 

And this one is Jungle Brites.  I like this.

The magic wand tool will take the colors you chose and map them to the fabric available in the project.  This can result in some less - er - eye-popping combinations.  Like this hot pink/bright yellow colored example.

Don't need sunshades for this, do you?

Or for this one using baby fabrics.

I love fabrics and I can see I am in for many hours of tooling around through the collections.  Oh me, oh my!  Where will the time come from?