And How Was Your Day?

Mine started out with a fizzle and has gone down hill and quite well from there. I'm not feeling well - so not a good way to start as Saturday. And then I go to deep freeze in the basement, to get some ground to make burgers with, oh did I say I was wanting frozen ground? Well lets just say that the good news is I didn't lose everything, but I did lose all of the fruits and vegetables and a considerable amount of meat in the deep freeze. It's a very old very LARGE deep freeze that was very full (of meat), how old??? we estimate somewhere around 45 - 50 years old actually. Yes I do know that that is very old for any appliance and it IS unreasonable of me to expect say another 25 - 30 years out of my freezer, but hey a girl can wish right!

So here's the kicker, the upright that's an upright deep freeze, as opposed to the monstorous chest freezer that had just died, didn't want to start when I turned it on. Seems that after a year of sitting empty going back to work wasn't in the cards - and it's a brand new freezer.

The good news is in approximately 10 - 14 days we should have a new deep freezer, chest style, and the upright will be serviced on Tuesday.

I hope everyone else is having a much better weekend than we are.

Studio Clean Up


The studio clean up continues, today John came home and asked me what I was doing, moving back into my studio I stated. It seems it's going to be awhile before I'll get the studio out of the house again so I have no choice but to unpack So I've been cleaning the storage units out and am reorganizing and am thinking of packaging some things up to go off and live with others. For some reason this seems to be a necessary task every few years or so.


The mess behind Gretchen, the dress form, is cleaned up and she is now living in the Wild Hyacinths room, our very small guest bedroom. Yes I've taken to naming the rooms in my house, doesn't everyone?

Barn Series

Yes the colors REALLY are this vivid! Acquired using Cochineal on silk fabrics.


About two weeks ago I found a series of sketchbooks, from the 90's, in my wet studio, much to my chagrin some of my sketchbooks had been ruined when a flower pot had been placed on the top of them.

So I've been photographing the contents of each sketchbook, when I came across a set of abstract barn color studies I made in 1999 (I took Color Theory as one of my final undergrad courses). I wanted to make a series of quilts back then but didn't have fabrics that spoke to me that wanted to be barns! I've been dyeing fabrics the past two days and am now getting much closer to that goal, this is going to be a great series!


Barn No. 1

I have to take a break after over two hours of stitching on this piece. I dyed the fabrics today, the bottom half is dyed with indigo ala bound resist and then over dyed with cochineal. The top fabric, and middle two fabrics were dyed with cochineal cream of tartar and citric acid. The top fabrics are as follows crinkled silk haboti, deeper middle red fabric is silk organza, and the lighter middle fabric is silk dupioni. The backing is osage orange dyed cotton batik fabric and the batting is wool.
Size approx 43 inches wide by 60 inches tall. I won't have a traditional binding on this piece, I very rarely ever put a binding on my quilts. I haven't stitched the bottom half or the middle field yet.

Lamp

I found the vintage tin at a thrift shop about 7 years or more ago.

I found this lamp at the Salvation Army of all places, it has a hair
line crack in it which only seems to add to it's charm.

The carosuel to the right was my mothers, my dad made it for her one year after she found the horses at a local store. It doesn't rotate, but John says he can fix that for me, I know my mother would have loved it even more had it rotated. It plays music and has lights and the riders on the horses go up and down.

Finally!

I've been looking for a space in my house where I can photograph things undisturbed - read cat and dog free zone. So for the past two weeks I've been cleaning and deciding, well today I stumbled upon an area that is perfect, and why I didn't think of it before is beyond me, it's the guest bedroom. So this afternoon I'm removing the "all" from this "catch all" room~!

And what I'm finding in there is, not only my artwork, but lots of vintage goodies I forgot I had collected over the years.

Mirror Frame

This old frame was attached to a dresser that is basically no more, I plan to paint it have John insert a piece of plywood, that will be painted with chalk board paint, and will then attache it to the front of the house. Oh and I plan to attac some vintage blue quart jars to the frame to fill with flowers and such ;-) I'm thinking a nice pink will make the frame look wonderful, with some red over aqua in the recessed areas.

New Front Fence



I found this vintage fencing material along a road in Valley Junction a few weeks ago - they were having their "throw it out weekend" John wasn't all that excited about picking it up, can't say I blame him it has WORK written all over it!

I have plans for John to cut it into panels and trim it out with wood and attach it to wood fence posts. The wood he's planning on using is from a salvage job of an old garage. I just need to find my recipe for white wash so I can paint the wood white.