The Elves Have Been Busy

Yesterday my Gammill was purring all day.  I finished the quilting on two projects, and got about halfway through another.  Can't really reveal them yet, but here are some teasers.

This is a detail of a needle-felted wall quilt that I started for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge 49, use of chiaroscuro, or light and  dark. 

I obviously was not very fast, since this challenge was from around September 2010, and it is supposed to be done in one week!  I guess all together I have spent less than a week on it, but this little piece got lost in my sewing room.  Go figure!  I found it when I was working on the bookmarks for my art quilt group a couple weeks ago.

This one is a small detail of a Pamela Allen class workshop quilt that I started last May.  I am so happy with this one.

Here is a detail from a baby quilt that is still on the machine.  I actually went to a fabric store and chose coordinating fabrics for this project from a Moda line.  Usually I use stash fabrics and make scrappy quilts.  The bright yellow is the only one that I had on hand.  I used the Warm Wishes pattern.



I am about a year-and-a-half behind on making baby quilts.   In fact, I quit piecing almost entirely.  I guess it was because I was doing long-arm quilting for customers, and making small art quilts. 

You know, even when you've acquired a skill set, such as quiltmaking, you do have to use it or lose it.  First, I forgot that I had changed the tension settings on my Janome when I was using metallic threads for the bookmarks.  I made about five long strip sets for this quilt before discovering that my tension was set on "0."  The bobbin thread was one long straight line.  Then, I thought I was using my quarter-inch foot.  I was not.  My seams were about 3/8 inch.  After a bit of frogging, I started to make some progress.

All week I have been discovering what I fondly call "Lily Tracks" around my house and yard.  Lily Tracks used to be crayon, marker, chalk, and paint marks with which she decorated the walls.  Fortunately, she quit doing that.  Now she likes to rearrange things.

I noticed the deer on the roof of this house right away, because it is in our downstairs powder room.

I did not notice the continuing theme of deer on the roof until this morning.

No one has asked me why there was an empty hummingbird feeder decorating one of my garden flagpoles.

Lily had some help from Caden on this one.  They built a "Wal-Mark" by putting gravel from our driveway into the back yard.  And were supposed to get it all out of the grass before they left.  Whoops!

Tonight we are going to Cary to celebrate Christmas with son Dave and DIL Emily.  Poor things, they are going to Florida and Key West for Christmas this year with Emily's family.  We will be going out to dinner, exchanging gifts, and hopefully spending time in their hot tub.  I have been looking forward to that all week!

Speaking of Dave, he asked to borrow some of my "tacky Christmas sweaters"  for a party about three years ago.  You can see them all in this post.  Any way, I never got them back- they were destined to be Tacky Party sweaters forever.  But this year, Dave's office had an Ugly Christmas Sweater contest at their holiday party.  My beautiful Snowy Christmas Chapel sweater with beads and glitter won him $75.00 for first prize!

Okay, maybe on a guy who is six and a half feet tall, it might  does look a little tacky.  But the second place prize went to one of his co-workers, who was wearing another of my sweaters...the The Saggy Stained Sweater with Christmas Tree. I inherited that one from my mother-in-law who also worked in an elementary school.  Teachers really rock the holiday themes from head to toe.

Dave is promising to take me out to lunch some day with some of his prize money. 

Little Projects

Here are some projects I have been doing instead of getting ready for Christmas. Well, I did finish my Christmas gift project yesterday- and wrapped all the presents. But you may remember that I have been doing some remodeling at this terrible time of year. Terrible because I started it at the beginning of deer hunting season, which means DSH was not the least bit interested in helping me with it. And terrible because I still have stuff from our bedroom piled up in the guest rooms, with company arriving on Friday. So finally, Sunday night we hung our paintings back up, and I am so happy with our serene new bedroom. I avoided painting the closet walls until after Christmas, but I did make this cute little collaged wall hook to hang in there. I used one of the prints I won from folk artist Violette, and re-collaged it with tissue paper, painted laundry sheets, ribbons, sequins, glitter, beads, fuzzy fibers, Lumiere paints, and gel medium. Now I am inspired to do some more fun things in the closet. Wait- that does not sound right! Make more creative closet organizers, I mean! Maybe I will keep it neater if I have things I love in there to hang stuff on.

After having my spackling/sanding/painting supplies put away for all of two days, I took a look at the sink area in my kitchen and decided something must be done. For some reason, our builders put wallpaper behind the sink area with a too-short backsplash. Not a good idea, as with constant splattering, the paper starts to curl up and the sheet rock to turn brown and crumble. Maybe if we had re-caulked even once during the last thirteen years... Anyway, I peeled off two sheets of wallpaper above the sink, sanded the stuck paper off, removed old caulk, repaired sheet rock with joint compound, painted with semi-gloss enamel, and recaulked. I was going to put up replacement wallpaper in that spot, but guess what- after all these years, the old paper does not match the bright white background of the new. So, I hung this old quilt of mine over that area. It was from a pattern called something like Birds, Blooms, and Butterflies. I call it My Country Garden. I used hand-dyes in gradations of color, which has been running since 1995 onto the white background. I think I finally got all the excess dye out with Synthrapol last weekend.

Finally, my last project. This one might not get done until next Christmas. I was unpacking my Christmas stuff and came across this ugly wooden Christmas sleigh, which I remember seeing at my in-laws' house each Christmas. I was trying to think how we ended up inheriting the sorry-looking junior-high shop project, when I realized it must have been made by my own personal husband.

Unbeknownst to him, I have been beading it to the hilt, and it will someday be all shiny and sparkly. I am not much of a beader, and didn't know you had to let one side dry before turning it to do the next. All my carefully placed sparklies went sliding down the sleigh. But, I think it will be pretty when it is done.