frenchtown fiber

Chris Mundy and Kate House try to make art while navigating the crap life throws at them.

Monday, December 22, 2008

My First Post

My very first blog post: Hello world, are you interested in what I am doing? I really do wonder why anyone would care what I have to say, but I've created this blog to somehow promote my etsy site. (www.frenchtown.etsy.com) Apparently all of the cool artists have a blog. Now, I'm cool too.

I have a number of vacation days to use up before the end of the year. Today is one of those days. I've spent some time working on a new piece of fiber art. A quilted wall-hanging that I will call Pebbles in a Shallow Stream. Soon I will post pictures of it. It is in the quilting stage. I use a Janome 6600 sewing machine to quilt. Before I had this machine all I had was an old Singer that was my high school graduation gift in 1978. I find this new machine fabulous and still sometimes daunting.

Anyway, back to the quilt. I ironed that WonderUnder stuff to the back of  a bunch of "pebble-like" fabrics, cut them all individually into different sized "pebbles", and ironed them to fabric that kind of looks like sand. I really liked how it came out. I find myself just looking at it, noticing the different shapes and colors. I quilted over the edge of each "pebble" and then in the "sand" around each "pebble." Now, when you run your hand over it, it feels bumpy. Like very smooth pebbles, almost. I need to finish quilting the border, and then bind the thing. 

Binding is my least favorite activity in this whole process. It's boring, and I'm not that good at it. And usually, by then I'm already working on the next project in my head.

My studio is in the basement of our very old house. It looks like a dungeon but it is the space I have carved out for myself. It is currently a mess, but it's the kind of environment where only a few things need to be out of place and you have a disaster.

What kind of work space do you have?  Tell me about it. Recently I went down to my studio and found a squirrel looking right at me. We think he came in through the chimney that we had not been using at the time. My husband had it stuffed with insulation, but the squirrel was not deterred. we opened the outside door and he took off, but not before leaving behind some kind of fear scent that grossed me out for days. 

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