A Little Catching Up

We again have a forecast for snow this week, 1-3 inches on Thursday.  We'll see.  The 6+ inches forecasted the end of April turned into just a couple of inches, very wet and pretty and gone within hours.  It was around just long enough to get some nice photos of the tulips with a snowy background.   

Since then we've been having a lovely spring. 

This goose decided to make her nest in a flower box up on a bridge railing.  Why, I don't know, as it's a very busy bridge with lots of car and foot traffic and a large and noisy construction project going on next door.  And how she thinks her goslings are going to make it out of the box safely, I have no idea.  We're keeping a watch to see what happens, along with lots of other folk, I'm sure.   Spring does have its dramas!  Good luck, Mama!

Time keeps hurtling by with days filled with lots of fun things to see and do.  Sometimes, though, I have to just stop and catch my breath in wonder at this beautiful place we live in.  Here's Mt. Meeker and Long's Peak, spotted from my car as I drove home from a quilt workshop in Longmont last Saturday.

 Lots of quilting going on lately, but let me show you this interesting "before and after" of two journal quilts I made in March.  My friend Colleen and I got together to do some stamping and printing on fabric.  She brought the big butterfly stamp and I printed it on a scrap of fabric I had left over from some tie-transfer work I'd done last year.  See the green striped pattern at the bottom?  Well, that's ink that was transferred from an old tie. I thought it looked pretty cool so I added the leaf and some quilting and thought it was done.

But no.  A week or so later I met with some other friends to try using Inktense pencils, a type of watercolor pencil that you can use to add a bright, vibrant color to paper or fabric.  I had brought my journal quilt to show them and decided to try adding Inktense to it.  Wow! What a pop of color!

When Colleen and I got together we also tried printing thermofax screens.  I had bought this image of some fernheads from Liz Kettle at Textile Evolutions and wanted to try it out.

Here's what I made, using some fabric that Colleen had "rusted," by letting some metal rust onto fabric.

I did a lot of machine stitching to emphasize the fernheads, playing around with stitches on my Bernina and using a variegated thread that changed colors as I sewed.  I really liked how they turned out. 

But look what happened to the piece when I added some color using Inktense pencils.   Pretty cool, yes?  

As I said, these were done in March.  Now I'm off of journal quilts and deep into two big projects, the Bellagio cityscape I showed in the last post and a big flower enlarged from a photograph, and I may end up using Inktense on both of them.