Blogging from Work

Greetings from my corporate job. I am so burned out I could die, but it pays the mortgage. Besides, I understand the job market is not so great right now.

I tooks some pics this morning before I left.

First, see the pebble quilt I mentioned yesterday. Imagine running your hand over the "pebbles" and it feels bumpy. I should be able to get this onto my etsy site for January. You can just kind of make out the horrible mess that is my studio in the background.

I'm also including another studio view.

One more picture, I accidentally dumped my button jar onto the floor, and I got it into my head to sort the buttons by color.

My grandparents used to have what they called a "bungalow" in Lake Hopatcong. I spent a lot of great summers there when I was a kid. My grandmother, Nanny, had a purple Lewis Sherry tin with old buttons in it. I used to love to look at the buttons. I really liked the rhinestone ones. When my grandparents died, everything in the house was sorted out and disposed of in various ways. I didn't think to ask about it at the time, but I later discovered that my mother threw out Nanny's button tin!!! Ever since then I have been amassing my own button collection. I sew them into my quilts along with other vintage things I gather. I've got a top finished with a very old and fragile doll dress on it. I'll show that one soon.

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.