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just popping in to say I’m LOVING school even though it’s wiping me out too much to post. I’ll try & remember to take a camera in so I can show what we’re all playing with. I also need to take some pics of what my daughter’s been up to – last weekend she suddenly decided she wanted her nana to show her how to embroider, and she really did a lovely job. It’s not really surprising; she used to beg needle & thread from me (I’d give her blunt darning needles & plastic canvas at first, but she was careful even at 3-4 or so so I gave her real ones and proper fabric) so she could “sew sumpin’ like mama”, so I guess she was bound to do something more serious one day!
okay I’m going to take my poor arthritic, aching-from-cutting-cardboard-for-embossing-plates fingers to bed. Something more exciting soon, promise :)
In case you missed the attempts at resurrection with accompanying explanation: somebody hacked the blog and replaced it with one of those wanky little graffiti pages bragging about how much the hacker roolz. I reinstalled several times, but every time I uploaded a backup (all from pre-hacking, I’m not that stoopit) I’d get locked out again. Tedious as all get out. FINALLY got it to work by editing the hell out of the SQL, and then when I went to upload all the image files I had (I THOUGHT!) downloaded ,discovered I only had some of them. I do not know why. I can only assume that the download was interrupted without me noticing. So, at the moment there are only a bunch of images from 2006, and you’ll have to bear with me while I find & upload the missing pics and then edit the links to them. It doesn’t bear thinking about, how long that’ll take. I really hate hackers.
This will take even longer than it otherwise might have because (ta da!) I’ve gone back to school. A long time ago and far far away I did about half of a diploma of fine arts. This year I started again – I was going to try and join yr 2 of a program that started last year, but in the end opted for starting over. Largely because it’s been 18 yrs since I was anywhere near a printing plate or an etching press, so revision I needz it! Anyway, I am loving it. LOVING. Awesome teacher, really nice group of people, and most of them are even “mature age” so I don’t feel like an old fart in a sea of teens. Most of them also seem to have done a cert IV or something last year too, and even the two youngsters are fresh from years of highschool arts, so there are no real newbies and everybody’s just leaping in. It’s pretty exciting :) And tiring; man I’m exhausted, especially after the two days on-campus. And drawing is totally kicking my arse – if you’ve never done life drawing on an easel you have no idea (and I’d forgotten!) how physical it is.
Onyroad. So, you can probably expect to see more non-textile art here for a while, at least until I con them into giving me the run of the place so I can do some printing on fabric etc ;) My imagination’s gone a little wild with possibilities …
now that they’ve received them, I can show you the stockings I made for my grandbaby and his parents :)
Stacey asked me to make a personalised one for Carter, and I thought his mum & dad should have stockings too. They’re not matchy exactly, but kind of coordinating, and I tried to make them in the earthy colours Stacey likes while keeping them Christmassy. There are little pockets or bows on the front to hold candy canes or whatever, and the toes are stuffed – the lining is a more trad stocking shape – so you don’t have to fish around trying to figure out if there’s anything lost in the curly point. Despite the girlchild’s best wheedling efforts, I included a tiny box of Fruit Loops in Aaron’s, because Santa always brought him Fruit Loops and a mango. I’d have put some coins in as well, but I was getting awful close to the weight limit because of the baby clothes I’d jammed in …
even in the appalling heat of late … I just don’t seem tohave a lot to show for it! Some gifts, so you won’t be seeing those for a while, some random stuff, some xmas stuff, and other than that it’s been experiments (some failed, many worked – so far – but are stage 1 of 3 or something) and doing some mini postcard workshops and the quilters newsletters and working on the website and so on. I made some gorgeous silk fusion and not-silk fusion (hemp, paperbark, pima cotton, soy silk, wool, etc) to be used for some small works, but I don’t have pics of any of it yet (not sure there’s much point … silk fusion doesn’t look nearly as awesome in pics as it does in real life, and you’ve all seen it before). I’ve done quite a bit of hand stitching – nothing spectacular, but certainly enjoyable.
I was totally head down bum up getting work finished for the upcoming exhibition, until Judypaint rang me to say “um, er, um, I’m an idiot, I booked the gallery for NEXT year not this” … I was so very glad I hadn’t gone ahead and ordered the roll of batting and other stuff I’d procrastinated on that day! lol So now I get a whole year to finish what I started and also do some work that I had wanted to include but knew wouldn’t get done by deadline. Yesterday I dyed two of at least 4 pieces of fabric for a series that’s been percolating for quite a while and finally got sketched and annotated recently; am hanging out to get started on those. I also got stuck into the official website, which is painful given that I’ve forgotten more than I remember about php and so on … then I had to stop that to concentrate on the newsletter and dyeing orders and a workshop, so I didn’t get very far on my modifications :p Have I mentioned before how bad I am at juggling? Bad. I am not the kind of woman people point to as proof of that theory about women and multitasking. I am a bury-myself-in-it girl, which is not at all possible with kids and dogs and phones and so on, and the older I get the less able I am to get back on track. I’ve been thinking about talking to the doc about my meds, see if there’s any chance trying something different might de-fog my brain. I did used to be sort of smart and even quick-witted at times, believe it or not!
Here are a few glimpses of the WIP in the workroom …
 I got sick, got a puppy, changed meds brand, and somewhere amongst all that got some of my old energy back. Everything still hurts, but at least I don’t want to sleep all day. Not sure the energy is related to any of the above happenings, but I figured I should take advantage of it while I could and got stuck in. I was going to maintain radio silence as part of my efforts to keep the momentum up, but I’m feeling a bit lonely so here are some sneak peeks at what I’ve been up to. Sorting through lots of fabric, picking out pieces I lovelovelove, letting it talk to me, sewing, changing direction, going with the flow, experimenting, saying “what the hell, why not?”, thinking/daydreaming/remembering in that mindful meditation way that makes art exhilarating and sometimes therapeutic, handstitching in front of the teev, sketching and writing notes to myself, going nuts looking for the needles/thread/fabric I just HAD a moment ago dammit …
 
 I also did the newsletter and had a houseguest and hosted a few of our allegedly-elite sewing days and have been doing show committee stuff and guild stuff (actually chaired my very first meeting the other day, which is pretty freaking amazing for someone who normally loses her voice – for real – if forced to do anything like public speaking). And of course I’ve also been yelling a lot at the insanely wilful squealy child and the cluelessly eager chewy-bitey puppy, because this is me we’re talking about after all. If any of my neighbours have stumbled upon this blog, I sincerely apologise for the screechy girlchild, barky pup and bellowy mum. She really is the most delightful child in some ways, but OMG so headstrong and so screamy. I’m pretty much over the school holidays, I tellyouwhat lol
FTR, the above are all roughly FQ-sized, and the below are F16ths (from the same FQ, actually, so you can see how hopeless my camera is colourwise!)
  
I feel like that guy on the xkcd comic, the most boring [edit - least interesting, sorry] guy you’ll ever meet:
… okay, so I’ve got more than four posts, but I feel a bit like all I do is apologise for not posting more, lately (and now I have a complex about how boring I am; THANKS SO MUCH XKCD!)
 Anyway … erm. Have been a little busy. Sewing, shows and show prep, trying to get two new patterns ready for sale (finished <– this one tonight. It needs blocking, can you tell? lol), so on & so forth. Oh, that’s right, and messing around with the club newsletter, and dyeing SO very much fabric (and good golly miss molly is some of it to die for. I like it when my own fabric makes my mouth water! *G*) and trying very hard not to freak right the hell out about having agreed to participate in a month-long exhibition with 3 other textile artists. There, cat’s out of the bag, now I HAVE to do it! lol
Off to bed. Doing a mini workshop/demo thing tomorrow, sat & sun at the Coffs quilt exhibition (at the racecourse, near the airport, if you’re in the vicinity) … don’t ask me how I ended up being first every day; Wendy Martin doesn’t know me very well hey ;) Bleh I’m nervous.
 Heads up!
I got home from dropping the kidlet at school this morning to find a parcel on my doorstep. “Who’s that from?” I thought. “I’ve only ordered dye lately, and surely that won’t be here yet”. Nothing on the sender details. I tore it open to find a large, flat red box with Australia Post blazoned on it here & there. “Ooh”, thinks I; “I’ve won something for filling in those surveys they send out!”. Opened it up, and realised that no, it’s from Click and Send.
If you live in oz and send parcels overseas (ebay sellers etc, I’m looking at you), go sign up. I joined last week – I’m not sure I’ll end up using it (the price it came up with for sending some patterns to Florida was nearly double what I was quoted at the actual PO, no idea why), BUT! I scored a free set of electronic scales (the hanging sort) for signing up, along with a mousepad and some invoice pockets and the usual literature. Totally unexpected. No guarantee everybody who signs up will get a package of goodies, but it’s worth a shot! I figure the scales will be handy for weighing bags too (20kg weight limit), should I ever have opportunity to set foot on a plane again …
 I don’t know why I went incommunicado. Just felt unbloggy. I didn’t even read blogs for weeks there, which is downright weird. Been working on a bunch of different things, from newsletters (did I mention that I’m now both editor of Macleay Quilters’ newletter and a VP?) to quilt patterns to blah blah whatever. School holidays happened in there somewhere, and I finally got inspired and designed MY quilt. I don’t have a quilt on my bed, which seems a bit remiss. Remember these? –>
Yeah, I finally designed something for them (and for the umpteen pieces I’ve added to the Big Pretty Thing stash since then). Someone brought a William Morris quilt along to a get-together recently, and someone else said we had that book in the club library, so I borrowed it and started tracing bits that I liked, planning to cobble something together, and then changed my mind and went back to the source. I spent a week or so drawing motifs from William Morris wallpapers/tapestries and from the sort of Indian and Moroccan and medieval work which (I assume) inspired him, and then I put it all away and sat down with Corel to draw something me-flavoured.
 There’s a bunch of symbolry of personal importance and a bunch of stuff that’s just plain pretty – the centre is a mandala built around a hexagram (star of david, satkona yantra, etc) with flowers and fruit and leaves and so on; it sits in an on-point square which will be framed in the gorgeous paisley that started the whole thing. The next level out (squared) will have more applique in the corners, probably involving tree of life symbols & special animals. It’s intended to be hot and spicy and busy and complex; it’s surprisingly difficult to make myself put applique down on patterned fabric, which is weird since I just love that over-the-top hyperdecorative pattern-on-pattern glory you often get in Indian textiles. Anyway, so < -- there's a very small sneak peek at some of the motifs and a glimpse of the layout diagram.
I can't go without grandbaby spam:
I did finish it in plenty of time (shut up Judy) but only got the label put on today, and I didn’t want to post pics until they’d seen it. Now they have, so here it is:
 The Lion Sleeps Tonight Hiding in the quilting are a couple of crabs (he’s a Cancer) & a couple of other critters, lots of leaves & a tree or two, som bamboo & grass & a hut on stilts, and some lyrics from one of the most awesome songs ever.
a few detail pics:
 giraffe  hefalunk  forggle [caption id="attachment_1423" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="toitle"]  [/caption]  label
I’ve been busy and nonbloggy lately at least partly because this morning’s grand events were looming on the horizon – I’m a gramma!
Carter James was born 11:19am on June 26 weighing 3125 gram (6 pound 14 ounces) at 52cm (20.5″) long. He has very dark hair with a shock of surfie blonde top left side of his head (it’s so cute, can’t wait to see if it stays). He’s even more placid and unflappable than Boofhead was, took being passed around to everybody with perfect equanimity and surprising alertness – I’ve never seen a baby who focuses on faces & follows movement & voices at a couple of hours old. He’s just beautiful.
Carter:
proud daddy boofhead:
auntie pook, gramma me and daddyboof:
eeeeeee. Seriously, eeee, right? EEEEEE:
check the blonde streak!
now I just need to figure out how to quilt it …
and these guys at least have a watery home, even if I haven’t decided what’s happening next:
the girls were over today for our Saturday gig, all but me (and Loz,who wasn’t well so just enjoyed the company) working on a Ricky Tims convergence top. Wendy took off before I could take a pic, but here are the other three:
Judy (auditioning frame fabric):
Rosemary (more subtle and moody IRL):
Mum:
I finally got a bit of a spurt on with the baby quilt – I’ve been stalled on it for various reasons, so I spent the last few days fiddling with strips of fabric on the design wall while I listened to the river roar until things started to click. I now have many many strips of many many fabrics which I’ll have to come up with an alternative use for heh. There’s still applique to go in the two empty panels, not to mention quilting etc, but it’s looking orright, yay & whew.
heading over to mum’s now for dad’s birthday dinner and whatever … an exciting evening of TV, no doubt :)
 I rather fell off the blogging wagon there, didn’t I? Seems to have been one thing after another for nearly two months now, and I sit down in front of the computer with about enough brainpower to play a mindless facebook game or two. Birthdays, visits, two shows, I woke up one morning to my laptop giving a very good impersonation of an expensive doorstop and while it’s come good I expect it to be cactus any day now, my usual panicky rush re deadlineblah blah blah, and then to top it all off mumble suddenly started giving a distressingly convincing impersonation of a cat dying of old age and I had to butch up & take her to the vet. I buried her next to Black Cat over at mum & dad’s place. She was super old and was definitely OLD for the last couple of months so it wasn’t unexpected, but it’s definitely a bit sad and it’s very weird having no critters at all. Anywhere. Aaron & Stacey took birdiegirl back, and even Boris is off with Ross & Lisa, so there’s not even a stupid nephewdog to pat. It feels wrong – I can’t think of the last time I didn’t own a pet, even if my accommodations meant it was temporarily housed elsewhere.The idea of getting another critter so soon after mumble’s departure also feels wrong though, so I guess I’m putting up with wrong for a while.
Anyway, so, bah. Miss E is sick, and we’re having weather of biblical proportions AGAIN, and my house looks like a special kind of bomb – maybe the opposite of those smart bombs that only take out people? – hit it, so I’ve been cheering myself up a little with some lairy fishes. No idea what I’m going to do with them – the main idea was to showcase our fabric for shows – but there’ll probably be patterns/kits for sale once I figure it out. I’m not sure whether it’s ok to post a pic of the challenge entry, so I won’t for now.
 my baby girl turned six yesterday. She woke me up over the moon with excitement, opened presents, had breakfast, opened more presents, I finished the skirt I’d drafted wrong ~6 months ago so she could wear it to lunch, where she got more presents. We went shopping and socialising after lunch, then home for a few more gifts from her dad, dinner, and a few hours of playing with her new books. Very cool day, all in all.
Sorry I’m being boring and/or absent lately. I’ve been spending heaps of time at kindy, absolutely fascinated by all those little minds fairly VACUUMING up all the knowledge you can throw at them. Bugger the sponge analogy; these kids are veritable Dysons! Really awesome to watch; seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a the physical development fast track babies are on. I guess there have been a few stages like that, but you don’t usually get to see a whole bunch of them doing it at once and inspiring each other to new heights. Unless you’re a teacher, I guess. Which I’m not interested in being, since I’m absolutely knackered by lunchtime and besides I have a really hard time not saying shit (or worse) in front of the whole class and then there’s all those weird snippy notes the more peculiar parents send in …
anyhow, lest you think there’s no textiley sort of stuff at all going on, I would like to enter these into evidence:
 
These being 1) some very inexpert hand quilting/embroidery I’m doing on a piece of fabric whose colour hasn’t got the zing its pattern does, which E has dibsed for a cushion cover, and 2) some felt in need of fulling, made at the end of a demo by Dianne at the guild last Tuesday. Tres fun. Tres hard work, the fulling part; works a set of muscles in my forearms that I obviously don’t use for anything else. Not sure I’ll do very much of it (apart from anything else, wool makes me crazy itchy), but if it’s fun to stitch on I could be tempted.
Right now it’s just going to sit there waiting for Easter, two birthdays, 3 separate sets of houseguests and one 6 yr old’s birthday party to be over.
Today we got to give one of these a test run:
Stupid name, fairly nifty gadget. Took a bit of getting used to, that’s for sure – it would probably be easier to get the hang of it if you’re a freemotion novice, I think. I had to keep shaking myself out of stuff that’s become second nature, and I don’t do nearly as much quilting as some! I did quite a lot of swearing at first, mostly because I kept jamming up against the limit of the opening (eventually I figured out how easy it is to move it along to the next section. Duh. It’s really easy) or was putting too much pressure on and it was obediently skating away. Once I figured out what you’re supposed to do (um yeah no, I did not RTFM, which actually is not like me, so yes it does serve me right) it was fun. I decided to give some twirly vines a la Patsy Thompson a whirl, and sacrificed a semi-ugly piece of fabric and a buttload of thread to the experiment.
 
Far from perfect, but it looks pretty good (better than these pics would indicate, actually). I think I’ll turn it into a cushion.
not that I don’t enjoy occasionally reading about the minutiae of other people’s lives, including what they eat, but this rather tickled my funnybone.
Glenny is having a 600th-post giveaway and she wants more entries, so please go visit and leave a comment on this post or this one. The bags look pretty groovy to me!
Ol’ Warty (I do wish you’d give yourself a nick that resonated more with your personality, girl!) has dinged me with this:
The rules are as follow:
1. Put the logo on your blog or post
2. Nominate at least 10 blogs which show great Attitude and/or Gratitude!
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
5. Share the love and link to the person from whom you received your award.
I’m kind of going to cheat by saying that she’s on my list, and by also totally not caring whether somebody has already been gonged before. I’m also going to say that I don’t expect the people I ding to follow the above rules, since they’re all busy doing awesome things. So, I’m going to put down the immediately-springs-to-mind names for now (these are also, probably not coincidentally, people whose work I would – in some cases do, even if only by way of an exhibition postcard – totally hang/display/wear) … there are actually more who deserve a gong, but I need to get off my bum & move some furniture.
- Warty Mammal because she makes me laugh and her work is inspiring and because if she lived within cooee we could totally hang in the studio pretending not to hear our nutso kids jump on each other’s heads.
- Kathy Nida, because she makes me laugh and because she works so hard and because I envy her talent and because I wish she lived near enough to have a coffee & a bitch with on a regular basis.
- June because she’s lovely and steady and brave enough to move in an entirely new direction, and even though I’d have loved her to keep making crows and dragons quilts until I could afford to buy one *G*
- Susan Lenz because her grave rubbings are beautiful and the Cyber Fyber postcard exhibition was inspired and CF#2 could be even more exciting.
- Melody Johnson because she’s generous with her techniques and she’s such a great colourist her work literally makes my mouth water and because she contributed to my getting the hell over myself re fusibles.
- I was predisposed to like joanie san chirico because of the name (de chirico being one of my favourite artists and one whose symbols I’ve played with a fair bit), but it turns out her work is just luminous (man, I would kill for that triptych she did a year or so ago), so she gets a gong for that. And because she is apparently awesome at promoting herself and scoring commissions, probably because for starters she spends far more time working than yabbering about stuff, which I really should emulate.
- Ruth de Vos, whose work I’ve only recently discovered. I’m just awed by all that piecing and the beautiful transparency effects she accomplishes.
- Susan M Hinckley’s blog is terrific and her work ain’t half bad either. Another overachiever.
- PamDora because, well, you all know exactly how groovy her stuff is. Another one who mostly just does the work. I sense a theme developing here …
- Jane Davila because not only does she make gorgeous art, she builds her own studio furniture and stuff, and while I’m a DIYer I’m more of a DIY-bodger than a DIY-legend. My grandma could make furniture, and my dad can, but until they figure out a kind of wood that lets you fudge like fabric does, I can’t.
Grandma was a real doer. Bit of all sorts of very cool stuff; carpentry, lapidary, rockhunting, travelling, stone carving, embroidery (OMG the embroidery), sewing, etc & so on. I keep saying I need to do less yabbering & thinking and just MAKE more work – ie do more making, as against make more (house)work that I will then whine about & avoid, which appears to be the chief skill both my daughter and I possess – so i won’t say it again.
I’ll just think it. And envy those people to whom the just-do-it seems to come naturally, or who at least figured out how to make a habit of it.
oh, sod it, one more. Just because she is the funniest blogger I’ve ever read, and rude in the exactly proper way to make me absolutely roar, and I can’t really share her most hilarious posts with anyone I know in real life because they’re all a bit too old to have peed themselves listening to Derek & Clive. She probably thinks these award things are totally dicky but tough titties: I give you Antonia.
After dropping E off at school and coming home to rinse the sweltering ick off from swapping out the home readers (OMG with the muggy today, bleargh), I made my way down to the showgrounds for the senior cits … whatever it is, show thingy. Expo or something I think they’re calling it, mostly an informational thing but with some stuff for sale. U3A and various oldefarte activity displays as well as a show of art by various locals (seniors, one assumes), people from the council & the library & centrelink, a security systems guy and a woman who vanished before I got around to seeing what she was selling (hrm, maybe that’s where ma got the scooter infobag?). Oh, and quilties, of course, which is why we were there. A bunch of the girls were putting together charity quilts, and they had some stuff for sale and an assortment of quilts on display.
 Mudder figured it would be dead, so we took a bunch of sewing stuff down with us (it wasn’t bad at all really, esp given that the stall was free! heh). She made her first postcard with her first freemotion quilting the other day (and I forgot to get a pic, dammit) and wanted to make some more, so that’s what she did. Despite having left her darning foot at home and nobody else having one that fitted :/ You can do a fairly convincing landscapey-wriggley-lines thing with an ordinary foot though, esp if you lessen the foot pressure, so that’s what she did. I ironed a bunch of scraps to batting, and when she went off to talk I had a crack at the machine and made the centre of this. It was going to be an abstract, just colour exercise really, but it kind of turned into a tree. Well, a bit of one. So then I decided I didn’t want to cut it down so I’d make it up to journal size, which I did, but then I trimmed chunks off because the wide frame was overpowering the centre a bit. I used a lot of holy fabric scraps in this one, and I’m pretty pleased with the result. I may add a little more quilting, but the binding’s on so I guess it’s at least temporarily finished …
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CHITCHAT