Today I will ship my Shades of Sunshine quilties to Lenna for the swap. Here is the second design I created. You can see the first design here. I made three of each design. Four will go to ladies participating in the swap, one is for Lenna and one is for little ol’ me. I hope everyone receiving them likes them. I think I’m putting too much pressure on myself by not getting them completed earlier and in the mail in a more timely manor!
Here are two little quilties and I did indeed use one of the photos my son took while in Sweden. But first, I want to explain that during supper tonight our conversation was about all the wonderful native plants we saw today on our walk at Arrowhead Marsh. A prairie/marsh area being restored in upper state Indiana by Little River Wetlands. This conversation with its twists and turns lead to the fact that the picture of the sunflower I used in the quilties was taken at the Carl LInnaeus garden in Uppsala, Sweden. Carl (1707-1778) is the father of modern taxonomy for both animals and plants and my son toured his gardens while in Sweden. How cool is that!? I just liked the picture! But now I know a little of the history behind it! - or how plants got their scientific names.
I’m looking through pictures my son took while in Sweden this summer. And they have me thinking of the next swap, Shades of Sunshine, I must get busy on as it is due later this month.
I was happily working along on a postcard, when I decided to fuse the front to the back and the heat from the iron caused the plastic veggie bag to shrink and the whole card curled up. I should have taken a picture of the curled up card - but I attacked it with scissors first to see if I could save it. I was really liking the card before the mishap, now it is just an oops! piece. And maybe it will give you a laugh! I cut out the plastic parts and then recovered just the fiber heart on the left with the more plastic and stitched around it again. But it still curls up too much for my liking.
Which month is the busiest at your house? March is at mine, with April a close second, and then I’d say December. With March already at the top of my list, I have somehow once again over committed to other things I should have said no to! But it is all working out - by skipping the Thursday night class at my church for this month. I promised myself I’ll do the reading and assignments over the summer…. hope that works out! So one happy little thing I have completed this week is the ATC for Susan Lenz’s Cyber Fyber Exhibit. I confess this is my first ATC! I really like how it turned out. On the left is my ATC. The background and back are my hand painted fabric, the squares are batiks, and then there is some beading. Susan’s ATC is on the right. This trade has been so much fun. If you have not visited her site yet - do check out the exhibit here.
And here is my postcard. The background is a log cabin block in creams with a pieced heart machine appliqued on top. The heart is one half a vintage Valentine I printed on fabric and the other half a pretty red fabric. Then I covered the card with a red netting from a tomato bag and zigzagged around the heart. Then threaded ribbon through the zigzag stitch and tied a knot every couple of stitches. Take a look here at the card I received from Susan.
Look what was delivered to me last Thursday! Aren’t they beautiful? And a total surprise! A sweet young couple sent them to me as a “thank you” for the quilt I made for their wedding gift! How about that! I didn’t get just a card but a nice bouquet of fresh flowers!
The other fun thing about getting the flowers was they arrived the day before my birthday! I had gone out to lunch with friends, so the celebrating started a day early!
On Friday my husband and I ate at Flat Top Grill. He gave me a Husky Embellisher and a box of DeBrands Chocolates. Isn’t he a sweet heart!?
My daughter and I made the postcard using the embellisher. We will have more to show later!
I’ve been having fun working on post cards today. One I’ll mail off to Susan of Cyber Fyber - I’ll show a picture in a later post. My daughter wanted to see what the swap was all about so we just spent some time looking at some of the ATCs. There are still some available, so I asked to trade for #22. It’s been fun linking to all the artists blogs and seeing their creativity.
Drum roll please! Congratulations to Laurie of http://stone-belle.blogspot.com/ Laurie has won my giveaway of the pouch and three fat quarters! I must say I was pleasantly surprised at the number of comments left on my blog in just two days. I came across Lisa’s OWOH event through a link and decided to join that day, Feb 12th! Her invitation did say the 12th was the last day to join! So thank you to all 74 bloggers who made their way over to visit me! I do hope to continue to visit the blogs on the OWOH site while Lisa keeps it active. Thank you Lisa for the wonderful opportunity to meet others through your event.
Today I came across Lisa Oceandreamer’s Event sponsoring a way for bloggers to meet and participate in a art give-a-way/trade. Since I’m kind of new to this world of blogging, I thought I’d join in! Now, what to offer as a trade? I’m starting with this little amulet pouch, and since I do far more quilting than fiber arts at this time in my life, I’ll add some fat quarters. Pictured is the back of the amulet. I’ll hopefully add the fat quarters photo later today.But even without the fat quarters photo, I hope others will want to enter their name in my give-away!
As explained on the Cyber Fyber website: CYBER FYBER is an exhibition of international fiber art scheduled for January 8th through 20th, 2009 at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, 808 Lady Street in downtown Columbia, South Carolina, USA. The brainchild of Susan Lenz, this exhibit will focus on the supportive, global community of fiber artists with whom Susan regularly shares new techniques, contemporary approaches to textiles, and finished work by Internet websites and blogs. The exhibition will include three primary areas: Fiber ATCs (Artist Trading Cards); fiber postcards; and the work of several invited artists. The exhibition will also include FIBER DAY and ATC trading day. From the beginning, Susan Lenz is documenting CYBER FYBER on a blog/journal.
I took the plunge at my daughter’s bidding and have asked to trade for fiber postcard #21. I’ve asked for this one because Susan says it is based on the 6th century mosaics in Italy. The mention of Italian mosaics took me back 35 years !! when I got to spend a month touring Italy, with the exchange student who stayed with my family the previous summer. …
I’m waiting for Susan’s reply. 
