He Stands on Guard

Alex stands on guard day and night to protect his source of food - ME! While I sew upstairs he sits in the window watching out for anyone who might want possibly interupt his food suppy.

Like the school bus barrelling down the street ...

or the young mother jogging with her babies in a stroller ...

or the kids climbing the old magnolia tree across the street.


Yup, Alex protects us from all these deadly threats.


See.. here he is at the window being vigilant:


And what are the girls doing while he works so hard? Asleep in the comfy chair next to the window ... until they think someone is going to intrude into their backyard. Then they are up and out to the back yard to bark at the intruder... like a squirrel, the dog next door or, the worst, some other dog being walked by its owner.

The house and I are very well protected, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For all this hard work, they each get about half a cup of dog food and a doggy treat once a day.


From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.


Have a great weekend!

Carol Doak Class

On Friday I was in an all day class with Carol Doak. Carol's claim to fame is her publication of a zillion paper piecing designs as well is her well organized and methodical way of creating paper pieced blocks. Our area was very lucky to have her here for about two weeks. She gave three lecture/trunk shows and held about six classes. She is a pretty good teacher and was able to adjust her teaching to make complete newbies comfortable as well as more seasoned quilters successful.

The major draw was that Carol has annouced that she is going to be taking some time off and not traveling for a while. I don't know if this means she is retiring from the teaching circuit or that she wants to spend time with her newly retired husband but I do know that you won't go wrong if you catch a class by her. One caveat is that she does do a lot of selling class, but, then again ,she has a lot of information to share that is included in the things she sells.

We worked on a small wall hanging from her 'Mariner's Compass' book. The center piece of the block was the block she calls France. It is made up of eight elements with six peices of fabric in each. Most of the participants used fabrics that reads as solids from pastels and to primary colors. I used pieces from my stash of hand dyed fabrics and this is how it came out:

It needs a border or two and some quilting but I do like the way it came out, albeit a little unconventional. Before I make it up I may spend time coloring some of the pieces a little darker so that the shadows are more clearly defined. Unitl then it will go into my stack of UFO's until I get inpsired.

Have a good week!

Old that's old is new again

Singer has come out with a reproduction, cast iron, crank powered, sewing machine that can be converted into a treade machine, if you have the treadle or can be motorized, for a small up charge. The neatest part is that it costs only $99.00. I heard about if from All Brands and here is the link. This is not somthing I would buy but I do have an old electric machine with a smashed Bentwood case and I see they also sell replacements for those as well.

How neat is that?

Oh, the weather outside is...

in the nineties with no clouds and high humdity!



What is a girl to do?



Knit socks of course!



I just finished socks number two and three in my sock knitting history and I love them!



Pretty cute, right?


Although I won't be wearing them outside for the next few months, I will be wearing them in the house as the tile floors are very cold when the air conditioner is on. The yarn was varigated and made such a great pattern that some people thought I was using multiple colors of yarn rather than just one.


I am so pleased with these I just might start another pair this weekend.


Sock number one, you ask? It was so badly done that it would be better off filled with a roll of quarters and used as a sap than worn on anyone's feet.

Why socks, you ask? My son, many years ago, wanted to knit his own socks so that he could get ones that would fit his short, wide feet. I bought him a bunch of materials and they never got used. Now that I know what I am doing he may get interested in sock knitting again.

How cool is that? A cute thirty year-old Asian man knitting his own socks.

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

Have a good weekend!

For Your Consderation

At the Quilt Show there were three vendors that were definitely not your typical quilt show offerings. All three are fairly local and only one has a bricks and motar presence. For your consideration of some unique items you should try:

Focus Glass - Neil Pickthall makes wonderful dichoric glass items from large mirrors and platters all the way down to buttons.... yes ... buttons! I picked up a few buttons but wished I had also spent more time in his booth with the pendants and platters after I saw what others had purchased. I needed to get back to the fish pond so only made a cursory trip and I would be glad to see his stuff in other venues... or I could just go on-line and blow my credit card balance that way! Here's a shot of the buttons I picked up and the picture really doesn't do them justice:

Seditious Seraphim - This was a booth full of crazy stuff... silks and beads and cottons and cords and trims and lots of other stuff. Based in Corpus Christi, the two women in the booth were people I'd love to know. Wearable art is deifnitely their thing and I wish their etsy store and website had just some of the things they were offering at the Quilt Show. I picked up some silk, cords and beads for a very small cost. These bits will probably make it into my next Embellisher project. Taylor Stephens, the owner, taught at the International Quilt Festival last year and I hope she comes back. I think her classes would appeal to anyone who is looking for another creative outlet.

Paula's Primitives - This double booth had everything you coud want for rug hooking with strips of woven wool fabric. Although knitting does not seem to be their bag I did pick up a couple of sets of wonderful knitting needles and had a moment to notice that they had some lovely yarns. Most of their offerings were of wool yardage or kits for rug hooking. They do have a store front in Dayton (just down the road from here) but it is not open on a regular basis. Maybe my knitting buddies and I will need to take a field trip there and see if we can change their minds. It's worth a try to have another source of good yarn available locally.

I don't think Kingwood is unusual to have such diverse vendors at a quilt show. Next time you think about shopping at a quilt show be prepared to find some non-quilting vendors and give them your business. You'll be glad you did!

BTW - thanks to the incomparable Ms M for the selection of these vendors - I am so glad she sought out these people to have at our show. I hope the next vendor chairman will also seek out the unusual and not stick to typical quilting shops. Thanks M!

Oh Joy! Oh Bliss!

The Kingwood Area Quilt Guild bi-annual Quilt Show is over and I have very mixed feelings about it all.

I organized the Fish Pond/Garage Sale part of the show and I keep wondering if there was more I could have done to sell guild cast offs for more money. I think I raised a lot of money... at least $1,500.00 but I can't help but wonder if there was a better way to do it.

I am VERY happy that it is all over. My dining room is empty of all the boxes and bins I had in there full of stuff. In the end about 50 boxes and bins went through this house to the store room and then to the Quilt Show.

The most positive note, besides raising a lot of money, is that I got rid of absolutely everything... right down to the bags we used to for scrap fabrics and for big grab bags. The final small box of scrap fabrics went to one of the charity sewing groups and the last six books came home with me of which only one is something I would not have bought.

I was lucky in that I got a lot of stuff from a past member's stash as it took some of the pressure off the rest of the guild to get me stuff. I don't know if we will ever have that much stuff the next tme we do this.

To make sure we have lots of stuff next time, I am thinking that every guild member could be asked to get a bin that they will use until the next show to gather their old magazines, books, scraps, dead projects and anything else the next Fish Pond chair can sell. Wtih over 100 potential donors that's a lot of stuff to sell off.

So I have been enjoying the joy and bliss of having my life back. I slept all thorugh the morning without once wondering if there was something I should be doing to prepare for the sale.

I do have one regret that it is all over... I no longer have an incredibe stash of reading material avaiable to me on a whim. I guess that is why one of the last things I did before going to set-up the tables of stuff, I went through the house looking for books and magazines that had migrated out of the dining room into the kitchen, the bathrooms and the bedrooms.

I don't miss that enough to volunteer to do it again!

Fabric Collage Artist

If you think all fabric collage is dorky, be prepared to have your mind changed by Laura Btrietman.

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! Thanks Joyce for the link,

Nejman Experiment

Besides completing the knitting needles cases for the Middle School Knitting Club, I spent some time during all the rain playing with some of the techniques I picked up at the Christoper Nejman class. Here's the 22" squarish pillow I just finished stuffing:

I started out with a piece of cotton canvas that I had used as a drip cloth with the Arts & Crafts Cub. It was slightly stained with paints and dyes but stll in good condition. I then went to the scrap bag and pulled out all sorts of fabrics to see which ones worked best when run through the embellisher. I soon found out that the softer, thinner fabrics worked very well and that fabric content really didn't matter if the fabric was flimsy enough.

After I had covered the canvas with tons of different fabrics I had a pretty messy piece of canvas.... ugly colors but some nice textures.... it really looked like the dog's breakfast. I decided I needed a way to meld the colors together and found a piece of grey chiffon with scribbly black flowers drawn on it that I cut into chunks and put through the embellisher machine. The original colors show through a little but I think the overlay gives it an interesting look.

I then played with some black wool and couched it down with a multi-step zig zag stitch. The beaded middle of the flower was a little less successful. I couched down bits of an old neckace and glued down some of the beads as well. There are black beads everywhere on the floor and, for some reason, Alex is not interested in eating them. I guess I will need to do some vaccuuming!

The stuffing was some that was left from the Anti-ouch pouch project and the back is a bit of fabric that I keep thinking I have a lot of only to find I only have an usuable half yard of it. There is zipper closure about a third of the way down the back done with a lapped insertion so that the zipper is invisible.

I had fun playing with the front of the pillow but I don't think I would make another pillow this way... at least not for my house. With three puppies and a veteran couch napper (me!) something as purely decorative as this has a high probability of being destroyed by either the dogs playing with it or by me tossing it off the couch everytime I want to nap.

I will definitely try this again but next time I will end up with fewer layers, a lighter base fabric and a better bead attaching method. With those changes, and, some thinking about the design before I start, I may avoid some of the issues I have with this effort like beads falling off and the front having a final feel like luan mahogany. Also, I would make this as a gift for someone else to deal with or in a different project like a purse or tote bag.

This does sound pretty negative but I really did enjoy the whole process and look forward to trying again.

Rainy Day Play

As you may have heard, Houston has been inundated with rain the past few days. Apparently we entered the month of April with a four inch rain deficit. So far in April we have had over TEN inches of rain. This has meant alot of time in the house waiting for th water levels to go down on the roads. My neighborhood has been fine but Alex and the Girls really, really hate going out in the rain. So much so, that when I am not sewing and watching old movies I am patroling the house for their indiscreet deposits.

It started pouring rain last night and fnally stopped late this afternoon. To keep myself amused, I completed a new project rather than complete the stack of UFOs calling to me from my cutting table.

The Knitting Club at Humble Middle School has finally received a large batch of new knitting needles and the carton of needles and other supplies was getting a little disorganized. I brought it all home last week and spent most of the day today making various containers for them. Here's what I came up with:

All in all I made a zippered pouch for miscellaneous supplies, a roll of pockets for crochet hooks, one for about 10 pairs of short length needles, another one for the medium length needles, one for double pointed needles and one for circular needles. I ran out of ideas for a case for the tons of long needles that have been donated to us and for the large size donated crochet hooks. I hope you noted the cheesy hand lettered labels on the packets. When I thought up this project I wanted to embroider the labels like I did for my own cases but the big machine is in the shop I made do with a Sharpie.

Where ever you are please do not pray for rain... even if you are in a drought area. I know, that with Houston's luck, the rain will miss you and come directly to our water logged bayous.

Have a dry week!

Christopher Nejman

I just spent the last two days at a class with Christopher Nejman of 'Pillows' fame. He uses pillows as the product for his innovative fabric manipulation techniques. I was really looking forward to this class as I love his work even though I had heard from several others that he was autocratic and a real pain in the butt as a teacher. I was prepared to love and hate the class and, surprise, surprise, I loved and hated it both.


This was a class sponsored by a sewing machine and fabric store called Fabrics Etcetera. The store sells Babylock machines and the 'Embellisher' was the main tool used in the class. One of the store's goals is to sell machines and as Nejman is a Babylock spokesman, it seems like a match made in heaven. The love part is that the only supplies needed by the students were a pair of scissors. The bad part is that there were THREE students per machine. That meant that only one third of the time available for actually working on the project was productive time. I am too impatient to sit and watch others work and I am not nice enough to smilingly offer encouraging advice to others when all I want to do is get something done.

The other love/hate part of the Babylock link is that there were presentations during the two days on several Babylock products. Good to hear about the products and have a chance to use them but bad to waste time on products you really have no interest in purchasing. I also hate paying, even a modest sum, for a sales pitch. The class was extremely well priced, only $100.00 for two days of instruction, use of the machines, all the supplies and food, but all the waiting to actualy do something and the wasted sales pitches made me wonder about my desire to take other classes in this format.

The big love about the class was Nejman himself. He does have a great method for combining many techniques to make innovative items and his love for the topic is clearly visible. He had all of us, even me, with my two left feet and no sense of rhythm, up and dancing during breaks. Laughter was the order of the day and stories about his life added a lot to my enjoyment. On the other hand, my inability to gracefully wait through all the other garbage was visible to all but the brain dead. During the down times I finished up knitting a sock, got its match started, completed half a dozen games of Sudoku and read about 50 pages of my current science fiction novel, so all was not lost.

Here are a couple of shots of the examples from his book that he brought with him:



and a couple of shots of the first day's project.

One shot of an example of what we tried to duplicate on the the second day.




In the small world category - Nejman is a hair dresser and lives in New Port Richey in Florida, my parents former Winter home. He worked at J. C. Penney for many years and my mother used to have her hair done there once in a while... I wonder if she ever had him do her hair?

It looks like he will be back in town later this year with a two day class associated with his as yet unpublished new book - Celebrity Bags. The cost will be two to three times higher than the class I just completed because of the qualty of the kit needed. Once again we won't need to bring anything so there will be a lot of sitting around waiting to get something done. I would like to make one of his bags but I don't think they make chill pills strong enough to over come my inner boredom beast. Maybe I just need to find a distracting project for the down times or to rent a room in the hotel where the class is held so I can nap or sew on my own projects between times.

No matter what I decide, do not miss an opportunity to see Christopher Nejman. His techniques and the creative energy they release are not to be missed.