I was at my local tonight (50% off - God bless January sales!) and picked up some lovelies.

These are Alexander Henry's Island Girls, - as the sharper eyed among you may remember, I collect vintage pin up girls (I have probably 50 more than are pictured here); so these lovelies were completely irresistable to me. I also love the Tiki island-like Aloha girls although they're a bit more risque - so I could think of even fewer appliations than these.  I want to get the Heavy Equipment boys version too.

And then, as I was wandering through the store, I came across a lovely print.  Although I'm not (as you know) much of a print girl, something about this fabric really struck me, and I was pretty sure I had coordinates in my stash - and indeed I did:


And then, while I was there, I wondered if they had a fabric that I fell in love with a few months ago:



Also by Alexander Henry, this one's called Calabash.  At the time, I didn't know what I would do with it, but at 50% off, why not?  :)

On an unrelated note - I noticed the last couple of weeks my followers list has gone through a lot of changes - up a couple, down a couple every couple of days.  Please bear with me as I work through this new approach to my quilting, and new way of blogging.  But if you feel you're looking for something else - thanks for reading along with me thus far, and much luck and happiness in your future quilting adventures.

To those of you who are new - thanks for joining me!  Looking forward to getting to know you.  :)

This is my third journal quilt in the series, a bit late due to a family matter that took up most of last week.

I started out with some hand dyed fabric that I'd made with the leftover dye I'd prepared for my snow-dyeing experiement (more on that later this week), using two different lengths.


Afterward, I ironed them to my background fabric and prepared to add the ribbon:


And then got my threads ready for my hand and machine stitching.


When I was done, I decided that it needed a little something more, so I added some beading:



And then I was done.

The words written below the surface are as follows:

Inspired by a poem by Morton Templeton called "Elephant's Plight" - the words written on the right side are:

...
He was hunted now by farmers.

A marauder of fields, a thief in his own lands.
He had searched a long time
This season for a mate,
none to be found.
...

And on the left:

marauder, hunted, famine, drought, ivory hunters, accessories

I don't know why these fabrics made me think of elephants in peril, but they did.

3CS 3/52

Have you ever heard of Tag Galaxy?

It's this super neat software program that gives you a star-like sphere with little planets - i.e. a galaxy.  to You enter whatever tag you want (for instance, "quilt")  and then it pulls in related tags (hand-made, fabric, etc.) which rotate around your "sun", and then pulls in all the pictures from Flickr with those tags.



Then you click your sun, and all the tagged photos coalesce on your sun,



You can click individual quilts all around your sun (your sun rotates as you click) and look at each of them:


And if you double click the pic it will you give all the information the original quilter supplied with their picture, or you can click on the information and it will take you to Flickr if you want to look at that individual's photo stream.



And when you're done looking at all the quilts on the rotation, click "next" (and here's the super fun part!) the next level of pictures come flying in at your sun, and you have a whole new set of quilts to look at.



Of course, you can choose a different tag than "quilt", but why would you?  ;)

Happy Wednesday!

If you've been with me for awhile, you may remember that back in October, I posted about a tree I was working on - the "practice run" for a series of trees I see in my head.



After looking at it for awhile, I didn't like the mixed cream background anymore so decided to paint it, and this weekend I finally got around to it.


As I worked with these colours, I realized that a: I needed to thin them out even more, and b: I was going to need a lot more paint than these little trays would hold!


But after a lot more thinning out and a lot more white - I ended up with this:


Although I have a very specific vision for this piece that it involves this orientation, BSP was looking at it the wrong way and thought it was a branch floating in the water . That would make it a completely different quilt than I had intended, but what say you?



Do you like it this way better?

::sigh::

This is my second journal quilt of the year on the theme "highly prized".
When I thought of what I prize highly, I immediately thought of my BSP (Beloved Spouse for those of you who are new to my blog), my children, my family. There is nothing that I prize more highly than my precious family and our love for one another, and I am nearly daily, consciously grateful for BSP and the life we have made for ourselves. I wanted something that was an abstract, celebratory visioning of that life.



For this piece, I wanted to try a kind of dyeing that I had seen either in a magazine or on someone's blog - it's a technique that I recall is used for shibori.  Of course I wasn't doing shibori, but I thought I could try this vaguely remembered beginning.