Let's Paint

Hard to believe it's been a week since I was retreating on the East coast with fellow quilters. We all brought several projects to work on and I believe everyone accomplished quite a bit. But it wasn't about deadlines for me, I was just there to sew. And eat. My favorite things. Affiliate link alert ahead.

Kathryn, wowed us with a demonstration using Inktense pencils and water soluble pastels. She brought several of her masterpieces, which were so inspiring. Then she let us play with her colors. I think more than a few of us are asking Santa for these sets.

I colored on some flowers that Kathryn had stitched up. She's a master quilter too. Girl has mad skills.

Kathryn also showed us how to use the pastels to create silk screen images. You simply color an image on the screen and use medium to squeegee the image onto fabric. How fun is that?

I whipped up another I Spy fabric book for my little cousins. Big sister loves the one I made her, so I made one for her to read to her new brother. He was born on Halloween, so I used some Halloween fabric for the cover. The blue crabs are our family's favorite, and football is big in that family too.

I brought a bag of selvages and sewed them down on muslin. Not sure where these will end up. Somewhere.

Loaded baked potato soup for dinner last night. I threw some diced tomatoes on as a garnish. I wanted to make a Thai red curry soup, but college boy and the Inspector probably preferred the potato soup. Whatever, it has cheese and bacon in it and I didn't have any cilantro for Thai cooking. I've also been craving beef and barley soup. I could make soup every day.

A Little of This, A Little of That

Hillbilly Hand Fishing? Really? Have you seen these guys catching gigantic cat fish with their bare hands? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since growing up we spent a week each summer in the Florida Keys hunting lobster by hand. We didn't catch and release either. We ate those suckers. Some years we caught so many we got sick of eating lobster, if that's even possible.

I'm totally making my young adult children read this.

How about those summer tomatoes? I'm in produce heaven. I bought these at our local farmer's market. They were so red and juicy.  Can you guess what I'm going to have for lunch?

Yep, a BLT! Oh it was so good. I want another.

Kathryn, one of my guild buddies gave me some small batik squares in pretty jewel tone colors. I put them all together and then framed them with a batik from my stash.

I made a pieced backing with even more batiks.

Now don't faint, but I made the binding for the quilt too. Very uncharacteristic for me. I usually just put a hunk of fabric with the quilt top and call it a day. Now to get that flimsy quilted.

I used the leftover bacon to make a bacon and blue cheese bread. I gotta get off that blue cheese wagon. I can't quit it.

Our guild is submitting blocks to the QuiltCon Block Challenge. Here's my rushed entry. All of the blocks submitted were really cool. The Orlando Modern Quilt Guild has so many talented quilters. It's so much fun to see what everyone creates.

Broke out the watercolors yesterday to make a sunflower ATC. I left everything out, so I may get to paint a little more today.

Happy May Day

I found a pair of jeans to upcycle into one of these Denim Do-it-All Bins. You should have seen the wide legs on those puppies. Out of style much? Poor Red was getting a workout sewing through all those layers. I could almost hear her sighing. I made the large version and it's pretty huge. Not sure what I'll find to put in it.

I finished the little Cake Stand mini. It turned out too large for AAQI (9.25" x 9.25"). Poop. Guess I didn't think that through. It was still fun to make. Yumi and I have challenged each other to create an AAQI quilt using half square triangles. I have ideas brewing.

My mini art collection. I wish I could read the artist's name on the piece on the left. I'd love to see what he's up to now. If anyone knows this artist, I'd love to know his name.

Link-o-Rama

I stumbled upon this awesome recipe site, Food Gawker. I think I bookmarked 10 recipes within minutes! Maybe I was hungry.

Photographs by Ursus Wehrli. 

Google Reader thought I might be interested in these photos. Google Reader knows me so well. This video shows how one of the photos was accomplished. What a job!