Surprise Giveaway (to all of us! lol)

Okay, to start with the good stuff...

Here's what I'm giving away!

No special hoops - if you want it - leave a comment - the giveaway will be open until next Tuesday, March 5th at 11:59 p.m.

Colours and an explanation, after the jump.  So, JUMP!

Hare Raising

You know how sometimes you get working on something and it just never feels "finished"?  This is one of those instances for me.

After you saw it on Friday, I put another 11 or 12 hours into it adding more leaves, more hand stitching, more flowers, more grass... I could have kept going, but I got to the point where I realized if I spent any more time on it I would never be able to sell it.  It's meant to go in a child's room after all ... :)  JUST STOP KIT.

So let's get to the meat of it, shall we?

Oh hai!

So, back in November, I wrote a post about how I spent a weekend completely distracted and tried like - three different things before I settled down and actually made something.

I posted two of those things, but one of them I didn't, and that's because it looked like THIS:

Tant pis..

Hey guess what? I forgot to post on Monday! Er... ooops!

Regretably, I had nothing to show you anyway - and I have nothing to show you today, etiher.   I was planning to show you a lovely fairy wren that I'd been working on while the gesso sets on my newest big piece, but the !#@%!#^!  commercial fabric that I used bled royal blue dye all over my fabulously worked background when I wet it for blocking.  Arggggh!

Normally, I would take pictures of such horrors and share my pain with you, but in a fit of pique, I tossed it in the garbage. 

So, I am taking a leaf out of arlee barr's notebook and re-working something old and "failed" into something new. (You really need to click on that link - it's gorgeous!)

I'm excited about the possibilities of the piece I'm reworking, but have nothing to show you thus far but a bunch of cut out fused leaves and ivy, and the picture of the finished piece I have in my mind.  See? Isn't it beautiful? 

Can't see it, huh?  ;)

Instead, I give you a picture of Jessie in an empty Thai take-away bag. She's very pleased to see you.

And I'll see YOU on Friday!

Fini

My hand-made Valentine's Day Card is done!

It was a big week this week (re work and personal) but our Valentine's Day night was wonderful.  Hope yours was too!

See you with the beginnings of a new bird on Monday!


P.S. I  changed the settings on my blog so that people with bigger screens (which most seem to have these days) wouldn't have tiny little pictures sitting in the middle of their page (a pet peeve of mine).  That said - is it TOO big?  lol 

It looks fine on my mobile app but at work - where I have a tiny screen (ten inches or something) when I look at my blog, I have to control minus the page to make it properly viewable.    Could you let me know what your experience with it is?

Working on it....

Adding a little bling to the heart...

This week, it's all about L-O-V-E

I decided I would make my beloved a home-made Valentine's Day card - and started with these fabrics. 

(The one on the far left is a gold btw - it photographed funny!)  I had this idea, which focused on the quilting - a really simple look but stand-out on the background fabric so I started work.

Hiraeth

"Hiraeth"39" x 29"

In the late fall of 2012, there was a call for a challenge group I don't belong to - "self portrait".  I had never done a self portrait and the idea sat in my head like background music that I didn't pay much attention to until I came across the word "hiraeth" on Facebook two weeks before Christmas. 

I'm an avid reader, and work with words for a living, so I was curious enough to look up this unfamiliar word and learned that it was a Welsh word with no real English equivalent.  But the closest equivalent is "homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost". 

Leading up to the big reveal...

We have a some little friends!  The otter and sprite and made from painted Lutradur, as are all of the rocks. 

The sprite's antennae is cut from a large sequin, the flowers are cut from fused fabric (the blues are hand-dye from Deb Lactiva); and the tree is needle felted as mentioned in Monday's post. 

Here, we have one of the process photos I found - someone hiding in the trees. She was put there while I was testing the effect of the foreground tree, but below, you'll find her as she appears in the final piece...

She peeking!

And you know who else is peeking? That little cat in the tree. :)

And a little fairy door.

I can hardly wait to show you the finished piece on Friday. I really believe it's the best thing I've ever made!   *bounces excitedly*

Hey, guess what?

Over the weekend, I found a few pictures that were accidentally un-erased and left on my camera card, so I can show you a few process pics about the trees. 

So, up here is a tiny portion of the finished trees section, and as you can see, it's very busy and fully in there. So come check out how the layer process happened after the jump!

Kit plans, the Universe laughs!

::SIGH::

So you know my fabulous plan - the one wherein I was going to take you through the process of making my piece over the course of two or possibly three weeks? The piece that I have been working on feverishly to meet today's deadline (and which is still not done but will have to do?) You know, THAT plan?

Well, after never having dropped my or any other laptop in all my years of exposure to laptops, I dropped mine TWICE in 24 hours and now it's deader than a door nail. Won't even turn on! I'm using my old one so that's fine (although it took nearly 72 hours to update!!!); but of course, six weeks of process photos are gone.

SO.  New plan is - I'll show you some cropped shots of the finished piece today and through next week - and the finished piece NEXT Friday and I'll talk to you a bit about the process as I go along.

New plan... do you hear that laughing in the background, or is that just me?

;)



Linking with Nina-Marie for "Off The Wall Fridays". :)