It's Finally On Line!

My sketchbook from The Sketchbook Project 2011 is finally on line! If I did this right, you can click on the title, and you will be magically taken to the proper page. Then, you click on the artwork tab, and you can see my sketchbook. 

I was looking earlier today to see if my sketchbook was on line yet. Nope. Then I got the magic e-mail and there was my sketchbook!!! 

Thanks for checking it out. While you're there, look for anything that says Sketchbook Project 2012. Click on that, and you can be part of the next sketchbook project. I had great fun doing this and I'm looking forward to participating in Sketchbook Project 2012. 

I Need A New Hat For Court Tomorrow

Here's the hat I made to wear tomorrow. I've got a sentencing and a probation violation hearing in the afternoon, so I didn't want to go too far over the top with bling.

Bling, Bling, Bling, Goes My Hat

I'll be wearing hats for a while, so I need to have a hat wardrobe. Here's Monday's Hat. I'll have to make another hat with beads. Maybe another with some fancy braid or ribbon around the edge. 

This was fabric that I bought somewhere for some forgotten reason. After I got it home, I realized it was utterly wrong for a quilt. Fat quarter is just right for a hat. 

Spending Quality Time In The Clay Studio

Canister in the making. I saw a set of three canisters in a catalog. Each canister was white, had holes in it, two had lids, and each had beige writing: Potatoes, Onions, Garlic. $80. On sale. Plus shipping. For that kind of money, I can buy 300 pounds of clay. 

I've been wanting to work with ^04 and do some reduction firing. This is the perfect opportunity. This is the first canister in process. I've gotten the sides done and I've got slip on the outside. I'll make the lid and do some incising into the slip for decoration and use my hole punch to put some air holes in the canister. 

Lid for the box. I don't like making lips, edges and other things on lids. So I cut out a slab that's slightly smaller than the opening and use that to anchor the lid. 

I thought it would be interesting to make a box with candleholders on the lid for Shabbat candles. The extra candles could be stored in the box. I've pained the inside with slip and I'll glaze the outside. I still need to fine tune the cleaning on this. I used a soap stamp to make the design on the front. 

The first box resembled the box that Velveeta cheese comes in. Hmmmm.... I wonder how this box would look if I changed the dimensions from 12 x 4 to 8 x 5. Here are the slabs drying to the point where I can assemble them easily. 

The first box, I used a 45 degree angle cutter and made beveled edges. I wasn't as happy as I thought I'd be with that. This time, I decided to butt the edges. This took a bit of math - so here are the instructions. 

First box with lid. I used the same design on the top as on the front panel so I'd know which way the lid was oriented. 

The second box assembled. It needs cleaning up and a lid. 

Jim's Latest Clay Work

Jim grabbed all of the ^04 and his extruder and started playing in the mud. I love the square pieces. When I saw them on the drying board, the first thing I thought of was skyscrapers in New York City. 

I Hate To Buy What I Can Make

I have a cyst on my scalp, and the cyst is leaking. This makes for a particularly unattractive spot on my head. I'm not much for wearing hats, but I have got to cover that cyst if I go out in public. 

So.... I took a floppy brim hat pattern and used just the crown. I grabbed a piece of hand-dyed orange cotton and some interfacing. I cut two of everything so that the hat would be self lined. I used the serger to attach the top to the crown. 

When I tried the hat on, it looked awful. I suddenly heard myself sounding like Tim Gunn and telling myself to make it work. I made the crown shorter. Ah ha! That worked. 

I grabbed one of my fancy threads to sew the hem in the hat. 

I used the same fancy thread to sew around the top and sew down the serged edge. 

I will need to be wearing hats for about a week, so I'm going to be making a couple more of these. Much to my surprise, a pill box hat actually looks all right on me. I wonder if I could attach a pheasant feather to one of these.... Perhaps an ostrich feather... Beads, it definitely needs beads. And Swarovski crystals. 

Trying For Peach

Peach #2 - red and orange. In real life, it looks like a creamsicle. 

Peach #1 red and yellow. 

#2 on the left and #1 on the right. 

A mix of green and blue that I hadn't tried before. I didn't get as much variation in the color as I got with the other dye experiments. 

I'm trying to replicate a soft peach that I saw on a hand dyed tee shirt at the Farmer's Market. I'm not getting the soft peach, but I am getting colors I really like. I want to try some experiments where one end of the skein is in the dye longer than the other end. I'd also like to try maybe blue on one end, then mix the green in the dye and dye the entire skein to see what I get. 

I suppose Dharma Trading sells a peach dye, but that would be too easy. Much more fun to play with color and see what I get. 

Needs Some Work Still

I did the machine quilting on the little quilt, and now I need to square it up and figure out what binding to put in it. This quilt was something to experiment with when I realized I was having problems with the six-pointed star quilt. I had been playing around with line drawings, and decided to translate one to a quilt. 

The hand quilting is done with embroidery thread. The machine quilting is done with a metallic silver thread. 

Dyeing 8-14-11

I think I let this one go a tad beyond pastel orange.

 I mixed bright green and sky blue and came up with a really pretty shade of teal. 

Another attempt at peach. This time, I mixed red and orange. 

I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I pulled part of the skein out of the dye and left part in to keep absorbing dye. I'm at the rinsing out part, and I can't see any difference in the color. Oh, well. It was an interesting idea. 

Dyeing 8-13-11

I mixed blue and orchid. On fabric, it makes a lovely, mottled blue violet. 

I saw a hand-dyed tee shirt done in a lovely, pale peach. I am trying to duplicate that peach. I used red and yellow, used less dye, and left the crochet thread in the dye only for an hour. I got a more orange peach than I wanted. 

The blue and orchid thread part-way wound into a ball. I'm going to like how this one crochets up. 


I've also been reading bout using fancy thread in the bobbin of the machine and doing upside down machine quilting. I wonder how the crochet thread would work in the bobbin. Perhaps with a purple metallic for the top thread to give it a touch of sparkle. 

When One Quilt Doesn't Work Out, Work On Another Quilt

I tried to work on the six-pointed star quilt on Saturday, but I kept making mistakes so I gave up. 

I had been playing with line drawings and thought some of the doodles would make a nice quilt. I played around a bit with this one. I'm using a deep pink for the outline and a pale green for the lines inside the outlines. I'm using embroidery floss and I like how the hand quilting is coming out. I will machine quilt the rest of the quilt. 

Solving Sleep Problems

I found a sleep CD on line. The music is designed not to hold one's concentration and to nudge the brain into deep sleep. And so I gave it a try. I downloaded the CD onto the laptop and left the laptop plugged in and the sleep CD running continuously all night. I did feel better in the morning. Alas, Jim hates the CD. He says it sounds like someone is vacuuming and it gives him a headache. Okay, let's try something else. I can't wear iPod ear pods because they are too big for my ears. So I bought this really cool metallic orange pair of ear pods that come with little rubber things to make the ear pods assorted sizes. I've got the smallest on the pods. The ear pods arrived today. Tonight, I'll clip the iPod to my tee shirt and pop the pods into my ears. I'm hoping this works as well as leaving the laptop on all night. 

Keeping Clean

On Sunday, I was having my own energy crisis. About all I could manage to create was some soap. I wanted to try out my new soap molds and the mica sparkly colorant I had recently gotten. So now, we have cute soap in the guest bathroom.