A Cool Morning

I'm up earlier than usual this morning, woken by the 7:00 AM stirrings of That Handsome Dog Gus who is visiting while his guardians are on vacation.  Turbo and Ben and I are almost always still in bed at 8:00, awake but catching up on the news and our emails.  But Gus is on an earlier schedule and Ben and I are taking turns getting up with him, letting him outside for a bit and getting his breakfast.  

I open the patio door to let Gus out and the cool crisp morning air rushes in, enticing me to go outside as well.  Though I'm in my bathrobe I escort Gus down the patio steps and out to the backyard.  It is a beautiful morning.  We have another month of "unsettled" spring weather before gardening can begin in earnest, but I'm heartened to see that the Columbine that I planted last year is up and looking good.

We're alternating between cool and warmer weather and we seized the chance to eat on the patio on one warm evening, the first patio dinner of the season.  

Turbo has woken and come downstairs now to join Gus for a morning nap.  

 

That's good because I want to show you this little piece that I finished recently.  It's about 12x12" and uses fabrics that I had painted or otherwise altered several years ago.  Does it look like flower stems to you? Well, it did to me, so that's what I named it.  

Here's a couple details showing the lines of hand stitching that I added.  

I think of these little pieces as "something from nothing" since I start them from leftover scraps of this and that, pulling the various bits from my drawers of scraps and putting them together until they combine into something interesting.  

Stems started when I came across some fabric that I had painted years ago and then set aside.  Sometimes I just feel like painting so I spend a few hours painting and stamping marks and colors on small pieces of white or light fabrics.  Here is a sample.  Once the painting fun is over and everything is dry I set the pieces aside and wait for some inspiration as to what to do with them.  The other day I was going through my collection and pulled a few pieces out to work with. 

Looking at Stems you can see that I started with a piece of pale pink marked with dark pink circles and lines.   

I found this contrasting green that I had marked with black circles and lines and cut some curved strips out of it and inserted them into the pink fabric.   

Then I found these two pieces of a luscious  hand-dyed burgundy that I had stamped with bleach-coated markers. The bleach pulled the color out of the fabric, a process which transformed the fabric into something interesting, but at the time I had no idea what to do with it next. 

Now I did!  Then came the borders.  I added the green binding and then some hand stitching to emphasize the lines of the green curves.  

I really like the results so I decided to enter it into a local fiber art show, "Threads of Inspiration," and it was accepted!  Pretty exciting!

I liked the whole process so I decided to play around with other scraps of fabric that I had painted years ago, and I have another design underway now.   I cut a piece of painted fabric into small squares and then added some strips of contrasting colors around the squares to make them bigger.  Here are some of the blocks up on the design wall.  

Then I arranged them on a field of white and off-white fabrics, leaving a lot of white space to machine quilt.  It's off to a good start; we'll see what happens.   

Oh, and before I go I have to say how two of my pieces were accepted into a different local fiber art show and were included in an announcement for that show, which was pretty exciting.  See if you can spot the two quilts in this announcement.  

Well, I see it's almost 9:00 and I need to get out of this bathrobe and get going.  Rain is predicted for later today, but it's still quite wonderful out right now.