Well it has been a little while since I’ve tended to this blog but I’m back with the new year and lots to keep me busy. There are several new projects on the table right now and even more stewing in the back of my mind. One of my goals is to keep this blog a bit more active than I did last year and show more of what I’m working on.

I’m in a show in February at the Northville Art House. So I am hoping to create some pieces in time. Whether I achieve that goal or not remains to be seen. With the tough economic times going on I’ve been looking more to the materials I already have for ideas. A lot of it is vintage quilt squares and fabric. Some of it I inherited, some of it was given to me and some of it I acquired on my own. So with that in mind I started working on two pieces. One is an old doily that I hand dyed this past summer. I dig the color. I don’t really know how this one will look when it’s done.

The other piece involves an old log cabin quilt that I purchased at an antique sale several years ago. It has been in a closet for awhile. It is not in great shape, several pieces have shredded, disintegrated, or just turned to fabric dust with old age. So I set out a few days ago to start taking it apart. I found lots of thread colors, fabrics and even two different pieces of batting. It was a utility quilt, meant reuse old fabric items to make a warm blanket. Some points lined up, some didn’t but it didn’t matter if they did at the time because it was never meant to be a show piece. I enjoyed seeing that aspect of it. I can’t make points line up to save my life. Traditional quilt sewing is an art that causes me pain. I admire it, I respect anyone who can do it because I can’t. But ripping seams apart – that I can do! I’ve had lots of practice.

So here is the quilt before I attacked it with a seam ripper.

One of my cats, Rocky Rocket, thought it was just fine as it was. He purred away while I hacked the threads.

At one point I stopped to admire all the work that had gone into this quilt. I also like taking macro shots with cameras.

So when I pulled out the squares I wanted I ended up with these.

Then I pieced things together with an old feed bag (another antique sale find). This one hasn’t really gone beyond this point visually yet. I’ve been building up the backing and getting it ready to work on. I’ve also been skimming through my grandmother’s old recipe books for ideas to embellish with. I found a great image of a chicken that may end up on there somehow.

So for the moment this is where things sit on the project list. There is another one on the side for the Weird Michigan Challenge I issued to my art group. It has a little ways to go yet.

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