What I Decided To Do With The Little Quilt

I want to thank everyone who sent me advice and comments. I finally decided to do what my gut said in the beginning - hand quilt. It was suggested I use a red to match the appliqued piece, and I liked that better than my original idea for dark lines. 
I'll use an iridescent white thread to machine quilt the background. I'm thinking of a close meandering quilting to make the applique and the hand quilting pop. 
I originally started with a line drawing that was merely meant to be a root with some shoots. I was surprised when the drawing was finished to see that I had made a Hebrew letter - shin. This is the first letter of the shma, a prayer we say each day. I was always Jewish, but I didn't know it until a few years ago when I discovered my grandmother's really bad German was really Yiddish. Her family had kept being Jewish so secret that by the time my grandmother came along, she thought she really was Lutheran. I started looking at my roots off an on from the time my Grandmother wondered aloud about how her name and her siblings names were Jewish. Sydney, Benjamin, Esther (my grandmother), Harold, Alfreda, Naomi. Alfreda was named after my great-grandfather's mother, Alfreda Butz, a French Canadian who married an Englishman. 

Quail Feeding In The Back Yard

We bought a quail feed block and the quail really seem to like it. I love the coloring on these quail. 

The Latest Little Quilt

Here's the unfinished quilt. You can see - sort of - the quilting lines I've drawn on. I started sewing with dark thread..... but I'm not sure I like that. I'm almost considering hand quilting.....
All suggestions and ideas are welcome. 

Playing With Design

This is one of the drawings in my sketchbook for the Sketchbook Project. I started playing with a design I had used a couple years ago. It's based on the idea of a root with shoots springing up. I looked at this, and it's a Hebrew letter - shin. It took me a long time to discover I'm Jewish. Now, I'm playing with this design for a small quilt. 

Making New Pins

A friend asked if I could make the beaded triangles into a hat pin. Sure. They will go up on the etsy site in a day or so. 

Jim Has Been Turning Wood This Weekend

Jim spent the weekend turning bowls. Here are some of his latest pieces. 

Hand Dyed Pineapple Fiber Fabric

I hand dyed fabric made of pineapple fiber and then turned it into one piece that could be a hajib, or a shawl, or a wrap. I used an embroidery thread nearly the same color as the fabric for a tone on tone embroidery using fancy stitches on my sewing machine. 




The second piece is a scarf and I played with a little bolder embroidery. I've got another piece for a scarf left and I think I'm going to be using white embroidery tread for that one. 


If you click on the headline for this post, you will be magically taken to my etsy store where you can shop in your jammies.  

Playing In My Sketchbook

I've been working in my sketchbook for my Sketchbook Project that needs to be finished this month. For the last few days, I've come up with some interesting designs that I would like to translate into clay or quilts. In the meantime, I want to keep playing. I'm using watercolor pencils and I'm about to use some watercolor paper to do some serious playing with these designs.