How about these colors in Alpaca? It is so soft.
Perle Cotton was on sale, and I love to use it.
When I opened the scrap bag of hand painted fabric, I found there were so many more than I expected. I love bits and pieces. A good day.
This month for Stitch Explorer sponsored by Sharonb http://www.pintangle.com we are exploring Spiral Trellis Stitch. It is a cool stitch-a needlelace one done with just the first row going through the background fabric. I found I could make a leaf shape by starting at the point and laying down stitches to form it. The lightest mound was done with stitches of different lengths which made a lacy edge but ended up with the stitches all the same, small size. The square I left open to see how that looked. The green curvy piece was just built up by skipping the last stitch of each row for a tapered edge and working back and forth rather than around as in the other examples. I like it best.
Here is the other quilt that needed to be finished that I found when I cleaned. The grey background I dyed; the brown I found in a scrap bag of hand dyes that I bought in San Mateo at a show I was teaching at for Aardvark Adventures. It was in that unusual shape already and just worked without altering. I love using scraps.The leaves are from a trim a good friend sent me. It is hand beaded.
It pays to clean up the studio. I found a couple of pieces that I had made and never finished. This is Journal sized and made up of torn strips of scraps. The green with the embossed pattern my sister-in-law gave me when we visited her in Germany.
I'm taking the Ratty Tatty Papers class from Dale of www.thethreadstudio.com and experimenting with lots of different types of paper. This is tissue paper that I cut up and sewed back together with a multiple zigzag. Tissue isn't as fragile as you would think.
Here the paper is on a felt background held down by decorative stitches and then torn out between the rows of stitches.
The leaf shapes are cut from napkins and sewn to another napkin. Now I'm looking at napkins in a whole different way.
Two of us went to the Portland Art Museum last week, and I found these cool coins in the store. We saw the Madame Pompadour exhibit and one on prints and paper casting. Next was a good lunch and a visit to Powell's books. A nice relaxing day.
These are the napkins I received from Ann in British Columbia. My favorite is the one with the forest type things.
